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

[cahn]

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

Comments

Re: Marie Antoinette's children

[cahn]

:((((((((( <3

But yay, this bio is available in English! Not at my library, alas, but my family has been wondering what to get me for Christmas, and I've just put it on my wishlist :D

Re: Marie Antoinette's children

[selenak]

It's a deserved classic. Of course the research is a bit dated. Also, it's worth bearing in mind that Stefan Zweig wrote this between two world wars, the first of which had made him a committed pacifist. He'd grown up in pre WWI Austria when in school the Habsburgs could do no wrong, and had seen where that type of history lesson led to, so he's somewhat iconoclastic/Habsburg-critisizing in response to that. All this being said, he was a master of the biographie romancee, and also of the German language; of course I don't know how good the translation is but he was a bestselling author the whole world over in his day. He was also very musical - he wrote the libretto for a late Richard Strauss opera, and when it was produced for the first time in 1933, his name wasn't mentioned anywhere, because Zweig was Jewish, and Hitler had arrived.

(His day ended in exile, in Brazil during WWII, where he committed suicide, shortly after finishing his memoirs of his youth in pre-WWI Vienna, Die Welt von Gestern, "The World of Yesterday".)

My own first Zweig work was his Joseph Fouché biography, a great example of how you can write the biography of someone you despise and yet make it absolutely fascinating. Most of the other people he wrote about he liked, including MA,but Fouché, he was both revolted and fascinated by, and it shows.

Re: Marie Antoinette's children

[cahn]

I will keep all that in mind! Thank you for the notes :D

Re: Marie Antoinette's children

[mildred_of_midgard]

It looks like it's also freely available for borrowing on archive.org, but you have to wait in line for the e-copy. Used paperback copies look like they start at about $4, so not bad either. Your call!

Re: Marie Antoinette's children

[cahn]

Whoa, I didn't even know you could borrow books on archive.org! HMMMM.

My library doesn't have it in text, though it does have it in videocassette?? which is really weird to me. (This is of course not at all helpful to me, as I don't have a VHS player and even if I did, I have all this stuff queued up to watch!)

Re: Marie Antoinette's children

[mildred_of_midgard]

Neither did I! But I went looking for it for you and discovered this.

Much to my delight, yesterday I also accidentally stumbled across volume 2 of Catt's memoirs online, which I *had not* been able to find despite extensive looking. Funnily enough, I was trying to track down an 18th century place name for somewhere in Poland, and Catt came up. So I have downloaded that and have it on my to-read list, when I can read things again, ugh. (It's kind of horrible to have gone from "can't read physical books" to "can't read books" but at least I'm hopeful that has an easier fix.)

V. H. S???? Wow. Okay, library!

Re: Marie Antoinette's children

[cahn]

I knoooow, isn't that weird?!

Oooooh, Catt's memoirs! I hope you can read it soon too :(

Re: Marie Antoinette's children

[mildred_of_midgard]

Yeah, me too! I read volume 1 and enjoyed it. And today I was working on the place name wrangling for my map, and I got to the most super complicated years, which are *exactly* the two years volume 2 of Catt's memoirs covers, and Catt was super helpful in tracking down some really obscure place names. But I didn't get as far in my wrangling as I'd hoped, because I got distracted by reading the anecdotes he was recounting, haha. Looking forward to actually reading it properly! (Making really good progress on the wrangling now that I'm past the Seven Years' War, and hoping to have an actual map to show for it soon!)