FW and SD are having trouble producing a male heir that survives infancy. Hence all the inspecting of bb!Fritz like he was some kind of backward worm.
Hence also Wilhelmine's own terse description of her earlier arrival as a disappointment in her memoirs. She must have heard that a lot early on, because decades later, when announcing the birth of her granddaughter to Fritz, she still makes a salty joke about it, saying the new arrival is "of that gender first cursed and reviled as a disappointment and later put on a pedestal and bartered away".
The White Lady signalling death to the Hohenzollern: supposedly during some of his nervous breakdowns near the end of WWI, Willy saw her, too. He lived on for decades more, though.
Perhaps surprisingly, Fritz was full of vitriol about his grandfather lack of talents as King*, and was much more positive about his abusive father's awesomeness as ruler.
Yep. All the excerpts from his memoirs go "Grandpa sucked as ruler, whereas Dad rocked". This being written decades after FW was dead and at a point where Fritz himself had nothing left to prove and had become a living legend to eclipse all the other monarchs, people tended to take his word for it.
French army and its (lack of) meritocracy: cahn, the deserved bad result from this is also why everyone was caught by total surprise when the ill-equipped French Revolutionary army not only beat back the Allies (mainly Austria & assorted German principalities, with some help from the Brits) attempting to invade them after Louis & Marie Antoinette got executed but then, once Napoleon had worked his way up to the top, proceeded to beat everyone else in continental Europe for years and years. With the obvious difference being that first, there were hardly any nobles in it anymore, they were motivated as hell (that's when the Marsellaise was written; the bit about the blood of the enemies drenching the fields of the fatherland was referring to said allied armies), and later, Napoleon, no fool he, kept the "anyone can go from dishwasher to marshal in MY army" principle. By that time, the Prussians were resting on their "but we are the army of Frederick the Great" laurels and suddenly found themselves to be the old fashioned, out of date and out of luck bunch. Defeat ensued.
Algarotti: good lord. Yep, it's clear where Fritz has his "here's why you shouldn't enjoy your Italian vacation" opinions from.
(BTW, if one reads 18th and later 19th century travel journals/books on Italy, it's glaringly obvious everyone found there what they wanted to find, both in the good and the bad sense. Those like Goethe and later Byron who really had had it with their places of origin at the point of departure loved it best, of course.)
Re: Random facts
Hence also Wilhelmine's own terse description of her earlier arrival as a disappointment in her memoirs. She must have heard that a lot early on, because decades later, when announcing the birth of her granddaughter to Fritz, she still makes a salty joke about it, saying the new arrival is "of that gender first cursed and reviled as a disappointment and later put on a pedestal and bartered away".
The White Lady signalling death to the Hohenzollern: supposedly during some of his nervous breakdowns near the end of WWI, Willy saw her, too. He lived on for decades more, though.
Perhaps surprisingly, Fritz was full of vitriol about his grandfather lack of talents as King*, and was much more positive about his abusive father's awesomeness as ruler.
Yep. All the excerpts from his memoirs go "Grandpa sucked as ruler, whereas Dad rocked". This being written decades after FW was dead and at a point where Fritz himself had nothing left to prove and had become a living legend to eclipse all the other monarchs, people tended to take his word for it.
French army and its (lack of) meritocracy:
Algarotti: good lord. Yep, it's clear where Fritz has his "here's why you shouldn't enjoy your Italian vacation" opinions from.
(BTW, if one reads 18th and later 19th century travel journals/books on Italy, it's glaringly obvious everyone found there what they wanted to find, both in the good and the bad sense. Those like Goethe and later Byron who really had had it with their places of origin at the point of departure loved it best, of course.)