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)!
Re: MT marriage AU, cont'd
Date: 2019-10-21 12:01 am (UTC)Re: MT marriage AU, cont'd
Date: 2019-10-21 03:02 am (UTC)Fontane also mentions the Austrian money Fritz got via Seckendorff well until 1736 - and also that Seckendorff left him in no doubt that this wasn‘t him, S, as a private person doing the crown prince a favour but Karl VI (aka MT‘s Dad) it‘s from, and tongue-in-cheekily (for a Prussian writer a hundred years later writing about the national idol) adds he wonders whether since Fritz ever paid MT (as her father‘s heir) back, since post-Silesia it‘s not like he was lacking for funds and revenues...
But really, Cahn, we need a new post, so I can tell you all about MT being unimpressed with her civil service asking for vacations when she‘s back to work in the cabinet just a few days after giving birth and her favourite daughter, Maria Christine, aka Mimi, carrying on a passionate love affair with Joseph‘s first wife Isabella of Parma (we have Isabella‘s love letters; in the 19th century this was passed off as a platonic romantic friendship entirely and just in the spirit of the emo age, but they had to edit out the raunchier bits to do so).
Re: MT marriage AU, cont'd
Date: 2019-10-21 03:33 am (UTC)Thank you for the instructive potato links and everything while you were at the conference! You're very dedicated. (If I were Fritz, I would question why you were at the conference in the first place and how it could possibly be more important than answering my questions, but since I'm not, I'll just say I'm glad it was a great conference. ;) The best ones are time-consuming and exhausting.)
I actually had missed that anecdote, but it surprises me not at all. Actually, the part that surprises me is how the hell this guy hadn't already been kidnapped. Since when did refusing to join the army keep you out of the army? Especially if you were tall? Especially at Neuruppin?? It barely worked outside of Prussia!
*moment of silence for all the shepherds and their ilk who just wanted to stay home*
Mind you, I had some distant family member who oral history says dodged being drafted (I want to say by the Wehrmacht in WWII) by hiding in trees and having the kids tell the soldiers at the door that Dad had gone off to war long ago. Whether this was post-War "I was never a Nazi!" history-rewriting, I do not know.
he wonders whether since Fritz ever paid MT (as her father‘s heir) back, since post-Silesia it‘s not like he was lacking for funds and revenues...
Lol, I would be *astonished*. The man periodically would do the hard right thing rather than the "this benefits me" thing (e.g. refusing to negotiate a subsidy with Britain until he could do so on more equal terms, saying he didn't want to be a burden to his allies), but my impression of the terms of his debts as Crown Prince to foreign courts was that he was trading not promises of specific amounts of money but generally being well-disposed toward their state in his future foreign policy, and well, that ship sailed in December 1740. :P I could be wrong; maybe he agreed to repay specific amounts of money, but I've read otherwise. (Mind you, I treat all biographies as novels and only believe things where I know what the evidence is, so this could be totally made up.)
And I'm also astonished there was a tall shepherd left at Neuruppin to be kidnapped, so impossible things are happening every day, as Rodgers and Hammerstein would say.
Oh, man, given what 18th century letters were like, I want to know how raunchy stuff had to get before it had to be edited out!
The Ballad of Isabella and Maria Christina
Date: 2019-10-21 09:35 am (UTC)Censored bit: for example a rare German sentence in an otherwise French correspondance: "Ich küsse dein erzenglisches Arscherl", "I kiss your arch angelic arse". "Englisch" here in the sense of "angelic", not in the sense of "English". Erz is arch, as in arch duchess, Maria Christina's title. Except for one, all the 200 plus letters still existing are Isabella's.
It's a sad story for everyone concerned, other than Maria Christina, aka Mimi, who was MT's favourite daughter and after Isabella's death became the only one of MT's children to be allowed to marry for love, not politics, the man of her choice. (BTW, in the two Marie Antoinette novels I've read that include her pre-France chldhood, MC is a villain because the rest of the kids, not blind to the favouritism, resented her. Antoinette didn't allow MC to visit her at her personal refugee, the Petit Trianon when MC visited Paris with her husband later, she only received her in the main palace of Versailles.) The Isabella/Joseph match was, like Marie Antoinette/Louis meant to strengthen the new Austria/France alliance. (Isabella being a Bourbon.) The future couple were incredibly nervous going into the match, as we know from their letters. Joseph, unlike his father, was still a virgin when marrying, and a shy, slightly stammering one. Isabella was more outwardly confident, but she also had inherited marriage trauma. Her mother had been a child bride, only 14 years old at the time of Isabella's birth, and said "I turn to ice every time he touches me" about her husband, whom she loathed. She also died when only in her 30s. Moreover, and most importantly, without "no homo" blinders of older biographers it's pretty clear that Isabella just didn't like men and preferred women. She wrote those 200 plus letters while being mostly in the same city with Maria Christina, whom she had corresponded with even before meeting her in person, and pretty much adored her on sight. And vice versa.
Meanwhile, Joseph also fell for his bride on sight, nervous or not. As well he might. On the surface, he'd hit the jackpot of arranged marriages. She was beautiful, smart, and very musical - she played the violin, which as you'll recall from Gertrud Elisabeth Schmeling Mara, was considered a bit scandalous for a woman at least by non-royalty. He remained smitten, and when she died only three years later, he'd nursed her through her painful illness, the smallpox, likelihood of infection be damned. (Maria Theresia was also present at Isabella's sick bed a lot; Isabella was the sole family member whom she never as much as mildly critisized but only had praise for. Maria Christina, otoh, was not there, but she may not have been allowed to, being yet unmarried, and a smallpox infection even if she'd survived it would have ruined her marriage chances. Remember, this was before MT allowed her to marry for love.)
If Joseph ever figured out she never loved him, and had in fact loved his sister, passionately, we don't have any evidence to go with it. And emotionally, she barely tolerated and not even respected him. In the letters to MC, he's ridiculed for not noticing she much prefers his sister, and Isabella wrote a pamphlet called "On the nature of men" which can be summed up with "men are scum, led by their dicks, never as much as noticing we don't want to have sex with them, and incapable of higher feelings". Don't get me wrong, being in an enforced sexual relationship is awful, legally licensed rape, and she wasn't obliged to feel anything for him. But it's still sad that not even friendship on her part was possible, because he did adore her, and was also a devoted father to their daughter instead of doing the period thing of being disappointed for her not being a son. (Who turned out to be his only child, and she died before growing up.)
(Joseph's second marriage was also a disaster but for oppposite reasons. He didn't want to marry again in the first place, since Isabella's death had devasteded him, but both his parents - Franz Stefan was still alive then - insisted, because dynastic duty. And then he pulled a Fritz on the princess he did end up with, going out of his way to avoid her, and being in her presence in the few years they were married mere hours. When she died as well, he stuck to his guns and refused to marry till the rest of his admittedly none too long life, which is why brother Leopold became Emperor after him.)
Re: The Ballad of Isabella and Maria Christina
Date: 2019-10-22 04:28 am (UTC)Wow, those letters! That is amazing. (And it's really interesting to see a F/F relationship in this time period with textual support, demonstrably not platonic romantic friendship.)
This makes me awfully sad for everyone involved. Maybe not so much Joseph if he never realized it (which if Isabella is writing that "they don't notice we don't want to have sex with them," maybe he didn't??) -- but I don't know, maybe it makes it even sadder -- and then his second marriage :(
And I guess at least Isabella and MC found love. For a short while :(
It seems like rather a relief that at least MC was able to marry for love later on :( Way to be a hypocrite, MT!