cahn | Frederick the Great, discussion post 5: or: Yuletide requests are out!

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Frederick the Great, discussion post 5: or: Yuletide requests are out!

All Yuletide requests are out!

Yuletide related:
-it is sad that I can't watch opera quickly enough these days to have offered any of them, these requests are delightful!

-That is... sure a lot of prompts for MCS/Jingyan. But happily some that are not :D (I like MCS/Jingyan! But there are So Many Other characters!)

Frederician-specific:
-I am so excited someone requested Fritz/Voltaire, please someone write it!!

-I also really want someone to write that request for Poniatowski, although that is... definitely a niche request, even for this niche fandom. But he has memoirs?? apparently they are translated from Polish into French

-But while we are waiting/writing/etc., check out this crack commentfic where Heinrich and Franz Stefan are drinking together while Maria Theresia and Frederick the Great have their secret summit, which turns into a plot to marry the future Emperor Joseph to Fritz...

Master link to Frederick the Great posts and associated online links

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I mean, to be fair, it may not be his fault that Euler et al. were unable to get water there. I mean, it may be! He may have underfunded the endeavor and micromanaged and argued with them until they threw up their hands. But it took so long to get solved after his death that the location may actually have made it difficult.

The pop quiz is total Fritz, though. You see it over and over again when people meet with him.

Yeah, Casanova sounds great. He's on my list now.

Edited 2019-11-10 00:57 (UTC)

That polymathy is really neat! Being the scientist and poet on the expedition is awesome, it's too bad he didn't actually do it.

Ahahaha. Being good at the amicable unofficial breakup is an art! (One which I sadly do not have, though I like all my ex-boyfriends.)

From one of my WIPs: "Katte wants to argue, but when you argue with Fritz, you lose even when you win."

Wow. This was... really interesting. Actually, yeah, crackfic is a good title.

Everybody shed a tear for the tragic love of Friedrich II and Elisabeth Christine.

!!!!!

I know! I was disappointed when he moved in with them instead and didn't even leave us any good anecdotes from the 6 weeks to compensate. :P I mean, I'm sure they exist! He just didn't record them because amicable non-breakup.

Right??!

Me, when I saw that: If by "shed a tear" you mean "spit out my drink," then sure.

Also too lazy, given the work involved.

How does D feel about the fact that we're still going? :P

*nods* At first (I mean, when you guys first started telling me stories) I was trying to give Old Fritz a somewhat similar psychological profile to, say, yours, but the more you tell me, the more obvious it is that this isn't the case -- that he really loved the people he loved in a very emotional way, and would probably have been a lot happier if he'd had better relationship skills.

Wilhelmine is interesting because it looks to me like she had (or was forced to get) mad people skills (which Voltaire noticed, haha) but she still had a crap life because she was a woman and women just often had crap lives, unless they were lucky enough to be Maria Theresia, I guess. (And even then, I still boggle at the 16 kids. Geesh.)

This just all makes me very sad :(

Although, I dunno, at least according to her memoirs she seems to have been ill kind of on a regular basis starting in childhood, often around the time someone was horribly abusing her (which of coures doesn't narrow it down a whole lot), so I was at least partially chalking it down to reactions to childhood physical abuse and/or mental-becoming-physical pushback to PTSD problems due to all the abuse.

Agreed. Fritz is similar to me in many ways, but not that one. I do kind of suspect I wouldn't have the casual indifference to people bonding if I'd had his upbringing, though--both the parenting and the 18th century context. A lot of my "me = Fritz" is "me + Fritz's upbringing = Fritz" and "Fritz + my upbringing = me."

that he really loved the people he loved in a very emotional way, and would probably have been a lot happier if he'd had better relationship skills.

Yes, yes, and yes. He let people get close to him with surprising ease (even when you take into account 18th century rhetorical conventions), and then he so often didn't know how to make himself or anyone else happy.

Wilhelmine: agreed. Sucks to be almost everybody, ugh. And MT may have had a less crap life than a lot of people, but she sure didn't have an *easy* one.

Ah, thank you. I have always thought (as someone who was not brought up Lutheran, but is sort of Lutheran-by-marriage) predestination can be dodgy in terms of practical implementation for how people regard it, leaving completely aside the theology, and it's interesting to see that play out in practice.

If God predestined the path a person chose, thus Friedrich concluded from predestination, then God had also formed a man's character, so how could another man's will change this character?

Hm. I don't know that I entirely agree with you (Fritz) logically speaking, although I see your overall point :P

haha, I can't keep up with you guys!

But I am always so excited to hear all this great ~~gossip~~ discussion :D

I love these. Especially Fritz and Wilhelmine are adorable. Tiny Terror FW is actually kind of adorable too although I can totally imagine that kid beating up G2. (Also awww to Heinrich looking up to AW)

Fritz: I JUST WANT TO PLAY THE FLUTE DAD OKAY?? STOP HITTING ME :`(

And then I think she became to SD a second chance to get the life SD herself wanted to have, second hand: Queen of England, not stuck in tiny Prussia with this awful, weird husband whose mannerisms make him the laughing stock of European princes.

Huh. This is making a lot of sense to me of a lot of what Wilhelmine says in her memoirs.

So part of me is thinking that presumably Fritz' governess, being both another servant and in charge of a child who plays a lot with Wilhelmine, is in fact somewhat more likely to notice than SD. But on the other hand I can't imagine, say, Maria Theresia not noticing her kid is getting beat up on a regular basis so badly she might get permanently crippled, whether the servants are raising the kid or not.

ahahahaha this is so great! And, as I said above, after reading this I had a whole new appreciation for the shade Fritz was throwing on MT's complexion in the crackfic :D

She listens to the suggestions one makes with patience and kindness, and sometimes accepts the petitions for help directly.

Now, she listens to little advice, shows as much pride as her ancestors did and shows herself vengeful and unforgiving.

...these both don't sound consistent, ambassador! Although, lol, I can see how "no, you still can't have Silesia" might come across as "unforgiving" to Fritz partisans.

And then I think she became to SD a second chance to get the life SD herself wanted to have, second hand

I was actually going to say, it's really telling when Wilhelmine says that the English marriage project would be a perfect fit for her *mother*, but not for her at all. And it is super common for abusive or even emotionally neglectful parents to live vicariously through their children, which it's pretty clear SD is doing here. It's also probably how SD justified her verbal abuse (which she wouldn't have seen as such): she's trying to give her child the best life possible, so why is child so ungrateful??

Along with

cahn, I'm inclined to cut SD a tiny bit of slack, given that

1) Wilhelmine says she was straight out lying to her mother about where all the injuries were coming from.
2) My impression of the social dynamics is that servants have a whole separate grapevine amongst themselves, in which people like SD are not supposed to participate. Even if a governess is a step above, say, a parlormaid, there's still a communication divide. So a fellow governess might pick up on abuse first.

But yeah, it's not great, and SD is far from blameless in this episode.

Oh, wait, I knew there was another one! The "hot or not" report from Guy de Valory, French ambassador, writing in an official capacity back to Versailles:

"He is small and of noble comportment. His build is irregular; his hips sit too high and his legs are too fat. He has handsome blue eyes, which bulge out a little too much, but which easily betray his mood; so that their expression changes according to his different states of mind...His hair is thick, he has a winning mouth and nose, his smile is amiable and spiritual, but often bitter and mocking."

Other people who commented on Fritz's eyes being the most striking part of his appearance: Voltaire, Catt, Countess Egloffstein, Lafayette. Given the intensity of his personality, that does not surprise me at all.

"The French seem to have been particularly susceptible to Frederick's big blue eyes—'the most beautiful I have ever seen' was the verdict of the Marquis de Lafayette, who had looked into quite a few beautiful eyes in his time—quoted in Bernd Klesmann, 'Friedrich II. und Frankreich: Faszination und Skepsis,' in Friederisiko, Ausstellung, p. 144."

Ha! Lafayette/Fritz? :P

Voltaire, like Valory, also seems to have found Fritz's smile attractive, at least before their falling out. ~~Somebody write Fritz/Voltaire~~ :P

So what I'm getting out of this is that when you, as an ambassador, go to make a report on a foreign monarch, the "hot or not" component is mandatory. :P

https://imgflip.com/i/3fui3w <-- What I had in mind for the Algarotti in Cirey episode. :DD

Re the second one, no citation given, but one of my bios says that, when Fritz was very small, "When one day the king saw his son beating a toy drum, he became so excited at this martial display that he summoned the court painter, Antoine Pesne, to record the scene."

#PolaroidMoment #18thCentury

Also, remember when Thronfolger FW doesn't want his family to fear him? And I quoted an anecdote about him beating up a Jew while shouting, "You should love me! Not fear me!"? A completely different bio says that FW's instructions to young Fritz's governors are still extant, and they contain, "You are to make him afraid of his mother, but of me, never." The biographer describes this as "curious."

Fear--I don't think it works how you think it works, FW.

Oh, and I almost forgot:

“Do you know that you are a fine man?”

pfff, English translator. My German translation has "beautiful man" here, and I believe Fritz does say "beau homme", not "gentil" or whatever in the original.

cahn, Casanova naturally also wrote his memoirs in French, though as opposed to everyone else in this tale other than the Mozarts, he didn't learn the language in the nursery. As you non-nobly do. Son-of-an-actress Giacomo learned it as a student, and cheerfully mentions in the foreword he's writing his memoirs in French instead of Italian because French is more universally understood and he wants this to be read. (A French friend of mine,

shezan, tells me Casanova's French is gorgeous and beautiful, and that he's on a level with Nabokov or Joseph Roth as a writer writing in a language not his own there.)

The history of the Memoires de ma vie manuscript is also fascinating. Casanova started to write them in 1789, the year of the revolution. He did mean them for publication, hence the French, and there were some early readers like the Duc de Ligne (not his boss), but he couldn't find a publisher agreeing to his terms, though he pitched it to, among others, a Saxon in Dresden ("what do you mean, a cut version in only three volumes?!? I've written twelve!") within his life time. When he died in 1790, the husband of one of his nieces who'd been in Dresden on business before hearing old Giacomo was in a bad state of health and hence could make the journey to Bohemia was present, and returned with the complete Histoire de ma vie manuscript to Dresden. When he died, his daughter Camilla inherited the manuscript. By now we're in 1821, and Camilla, no fool she, decides to go for broke and sell it to the highest bidder among publishers.

The race is made by Brockhaus in Leipzig, most famous these days for publishing the standard German spelling dictionary for the last 150 plus years. Brockhaus, now the proud owner of the manuscript, first goes for a "Best of Casanova" one volume German translation, then, when there's an illegal supposed complete French edition publishes a complete twelve volume German edition of their own. But! The dastardly German translator doesn't send four chapters of the manuscript he's been entrusted with back to the publisher once he's done; these remain lost to this day, and hence exist only in translation.

The rest of the original manuscript gets put into a safe in the Brockhaus main building in Leipzig and remains there until 1943. At which point allied bombings have reached the Eastern German cities, and the publishers want to protect the Histoire de ma vie, along with some other manuscript treasures, for posterity, so it's off to a bunker with the manuscript. Where it stays until the last days of the war, when the Red Army is approaching. The Brockhaus publishing staff goes west, but with the manuscript, and relocates to Wiesbaden (in the US sector), where the Memoirs are kept in a safe of Deutsche Bank, one of the few institutions still to have one in 1945.

Until the 1950s, everyone at newly relocated Brockhaus is a bit paranoid about this particular manuscript by now and refuses access to it. Then, in 1960, they strike a deal with the French publisher Edition Plons which leads to the first complete (minus four chapters) authentic publication of the Histoire de ma vie in the original French. And in 2010, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France acquires the original manuscript for over seven million Euro, the highest price this particular national library has ever paid for a single manuscript, which is thus now owned by the French nation.

ETA: Mildred, Cahn, which English translation doesm Gutenberg use? Because English wiki has this to say on the problem of English Casanova translations:

Due to the success of the (first) German edition, the French editor Victor Tournachon decided to publish the book in France. Tournachon had no access to the original manuscript, and so the French text of his edition was translated from the German translation. The text was heavily censored. In response to the piracy Brockhaus brought out a second edition in French, edited by Jean Laforgue (1782–1852) which was very unreliable as Laforgue altered Casanova's religious and political views as well as censoring sexual references. The French volumes were published from 1826 to 1838. These editions were also successful, and another French pirate edition was prepared with another translation from the German edition. As the German edition was not entirely published at this time, this edition allegedly contains passages invented by the (French) translator.

From 1838 to 1960, all the editions of the memoirs were derived from one of these editions. Arthur Machen used one of these inaccurate versions for his English translation published in 1894 which remained the standard English edition for many years.

Now, at a guess, Gutenberg does not use any post 1960 English translation, do they?

Edited 2019-11-10 09:12 (UTC)

Okay, the punishment-of-deserter/inner monologue scene (complete with intercuts to Küstrin) starts at 23:51, and I've transcribed it for you, as the English subtitles sometimes offer only a shortened and even differently flavored version of the German original. For example, when he addresses dead FW as "Vater und Herr", the subtitles only say "father", instead of "Father and Lord/Master" (can't decide between the two possible translations for "Herr" in this context, so I'm giving you both):

Yes, most merciful King, father and lord. I, Friedrich, Crown Prince of Prussia, must be present at the execution of my lover, Lieutenant Katte.

(German word is "Liebhaber", which, as I said, is unambigous, as opposed to "Freund" ("Friend"). It's also an interesting choice on the part of the script since it's the active noun as opposed to "Geliebter" (Beloved). No idea whether I'm overthinking this due to fandom or whether the scriptwriter wants to imply Katte topped. ;) )

Lieutenant Katte is to be die via beheading at dawn.

(Subtitles "Is to be beheaded at dawn" which sounds more fluent and less stiff, but the implication is that Fritz is reciting the execution order here from memory and that certainly was written in clumsy bureaucratic German.)

Katte and I have not offended against honour, Father and Lord/Master. My life is not so dear to me -

(Subtitle version: "I do not cling to life")

- becoming King is not so dear to me -

(Subtitle version: "I do not want to become King")

...he doesn't finish that last sentence, it's incomplete in German, just keeps staring into the rain while the deserter is getting punished and we cut to the Bachs having their own family drama chez Emmanuel.

Anyway, there is a significant difference in the last two lines between subtitle and original, wouldn't you say? The subtitles completely lose the implication that Fritz is mentally composing a plea for mercy for Katte to FW, as the obvious end of that sentence is "- not as dear to me as Katte's life". And there's a significant difference in characterisation between not wanting to become King at all, or wanting to give up something he basically aspires to and sees as his right if it would spare his lover.

he comment I remember was along the lines of, "What was all that body language with Friedemann about? Were they trying to imply Fritz was gay? SLANDER AND LIBEL!"

Well, you know, clearly, when he called Katte his lover, he was speaking metaphorically before. And he'd never, ever, fancy someone one of his siblings has slept with. Clearly. Not Fritz! Slander!

Edited 2019-11-10 09:14 (UTC)

d MT may have had a less crap life than a lot of people, but she sure didn't have an *easy* one

Nope, especially once FS dies, because that's when everything takes a severe turn into dysfunctional. Not to Hohenzollern levels, but then as Tolstoi has observed every family is unhappy in their own unique way.

For starters, it's pretty clear MT went into a severe depression after Franz died, and while her era was well familiar with "melancholy", they didn't really have a good way for treating it. This in a private person would have been unfortunate enough for said private person, but she's relentlessly in the public eye, an active sovereign with access to near unlimited power to vent her grief with. So MT doesn't just cut herself off from things she's previously enjoyed, like attending balls (even after she could no longer actively participate in them like she could as a young woman), gambling (she never played the incredibly high risk stakes daughter MA and a lot of the nobility in all European countries played, but she did play cards as a form of socializing and was pretty good at it), going to concerts (or have them come to her), theatre plays, masques, wearing colorful clothing; instead, abruptly attending the Empress at court means you're in, even after the immediate mourning period for FS is over, severe dark clothing, no leisure fun activity other than listening to the occasional priest reciting the bible or religious texts. This is not what anyone signed up for as a courtier and none too surprisingly, the nobility either flocks towards Joseph (when he's there, since he's travelling a lot in those years) or one of his siblings still in Vienna. Which heightens MT's sense of post-FS emotional isolation and desertion, and makes her all the more determined not to give up power and throw herself into governing.

(Sidenote: it's a minor point, but due to the 18th century frankness of discussing bodily functions, we know she had her period until she was 56, i.e. she had it for years and years after her husband's death, and until the final two years of that every time with heavy bleedings; that she had a still fertile body even at this age and alone must have seemed like nature mocking her.)

Which creates the severely Albee-esque mother/son dynamic with Joseph who as opposed to his father does want to rule himself, has really different ideas about how a modern monarch should rule and thus starts a constant power struggle with his mother that lasts for fifteen years. (He did like to travel after her death, too, but one major reason why he did it so much when she was still alive was because it gave them a break from each other. At the same time, this isn't a situation like the ones all the Hannover Georges were in where the reigning monarch and whoever was the current Prince of Wales deeply despised each other. They did, for all their arguments, simultanously feel protective of each other (so noble schemer X making snide remarks at the respective other monarch's expense was shut down by both of them immediately and thus didn't happen often), and the can't live with/can't live witout dynamic that evolved really took its toll on everyone.

Simultanously, there were massive Habsburg sibling problems. All the other daughters really REALLY resented Mimi being the favorite who got to choose her own man (well, if you were Carolina stuck with Ferdinand of Naples, wouldn't you?), and without FS as a balancing parent, they couldn't possibly show this directly to MT who was always also the monarch on whose favor everyone was depending on. So it came out in passive aggressive actions and inner sibling fighting instead. Moreover, Joseph's decision to use the entire private millions he'd inherited from FS to balance the state budget caused massive anger especially from Leopold (who pointed out he should be allowed to use at least some of this for Tuscany, his model dukedom,if we were talking state budget only) and Mimi (see earlier "what happened to Marie Christina" post), but to a lesser degree also from the others. Leopold also, again somewhat understandably and not so secretly thought that either MT should have retired or Joseph should have made his "do you want me to resign?" threat real because this co-ruling/cancelling each other out was getting nowhere fast, and he could do a much better job as single ruler than either of them at this point. Which is why you have from one of his last Vienna visits during MT's life time that extraordinarily spiteful secret memorandum outburst on the lines of "Mom's a half senile bitch, Joseph is an overbearing lecturing asshole, I hate them!!!!"

(However, otoh, Leopold: is actually Joseph's primary correspondant among his siblings. When Joseph during his endless travelling stops by in Tuscany, he doesn't just make the polite brief visit, no, he stays around long enough to invent games to play with Leopold's numerous little children, and Leopold, who is very aware how Joseph felt about his own dead daughter, lets him. And even the "I don't get you and your five ladies whom you let argue politics with you, didn't you get enough of that when Mom was alive?" letter is actually written in more of a concerned than in a mocking mode.)

Now MT in her final years didn't have the excellent memory she'd relied upon most of her life anymore, she did forget things, which she noticed herself and remarked on in letters to her ex-lady in waiting and friend Sophie, but she was entirely compos mentis, and of course she noticed that her children were at odds with each other in addition to her being so often at odds with her oldest son. It heightened her unhappiness and depression, but she couldn't find a way out of it (which at this point probably only a retirement on her part could have been, and even that would only have solved some of the problems). If you get around to reading the biography, Cahn, you might want to stop linearly after FS dies and only check out individual events thereafter, because it's really sad to read about.

Apparently so! I wonder, did the early American ambassadors at Versailles also fulfill this noble duty in their reports to Congress? I suppose Franklin and Jefferson wouldn't have had a problem with it, but John Adams might, given he thought Franklin had adopted French (lack of) morals far too much anyway.

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Page 3 of 16

Frederick the Great, discussion post 5: or: Yuletide requests are out!

Re: Casanova

Re: Algarotti

Re: Icilius

Re: Crackfic

Re: Algarotti

Re: Crackfic

no subject

Re: Emotional isolation

Re: Wilhelmine

Re: Emotional isolation

Re: FW and predestination

Re: Wilhelmine

Re: More illustrations - children paintings edition

Re: FW and predestination

Re: Wilhelmine

Re: What the Prussian Ambassador Wrote

Re: Wilhelmine

Re: What the Prussian Ambassador Wrote

Re: What the Prussian Ambassador Wrote

Re: Algarotti

Re: More illustrations - children paintings edition

Re: Casanova

Re: Crackfic

Re: Emotional isolation

Re: What the Prussian Ambassador Wrote