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: More Book Reports: AW bio, Fritz and Heinrich double portrait/lengthy essay

[cahn]

O.M.G.

So, like, I was feeling a little more sorry for FW due to asking you guys for good stories about him, but NOW I DON'T ANY MORE.

...yeah, I can now totally see the parallels to what selenak has been telling us about Fritz/Heinrich.

Re: More Book Reports: AW bio, Fritz and Heinrich double portrait/lengthy essay

[mildred_of_midgard]

The thing is, just because you're horribly abusive to someone doesn't mean that you 1) don't also have warm-and-fuzzy feelings toward them, 2) aren't wildly inconsistent in your treatment of them. The second part is what makes it really hard to walk away from abusers, or to call the bad parts abuse even after they're no longer in your life. The inconsistency *really* messes with people's minds.

And FW did at least the following:

- Teenage Fritz is very sick. FW, who's been terrorizing him, writes to someone (Grumbkow?) that "You don't know how much you love your kids until you're afraid of losing them."
- In his first meeting with Fritz after the escape attempt, in August 1731, after Fritz grovels a lot and gets berated, lets him off easy, to the point where a shocked Fritz was like, "Maybe he does love me?"
- As selenak recounted to us from Fontane, has the gallows removed from Ruppin before Fritz arrives.
- Says a few nice things to Fritz in his last couple mellower years when he was sick and dying, including the "I think he's going to do fine."

I mean, *I* am the one reading between the lines of "See? It totally worked!" BUT I think that's totally reasonable. He's just got justify all that suffering somehow.

Incidentally, all this is why, even without the prospect of eternal damnation, I've always been inclined to think that even an atheistic FW would not have killed his son in cold blood. Hot, yes, but I think some fatherly feeling played a role in why he let himself be talked out of it. This does not mean that he wasn't abusive as hell. It just means I think "visceral hate" isn't the whole story. I really think "feedback loop" is a huge part of the story. I mean, as selenak pointed out, he got into a good feedback loop with AW.

Also: future FW is going to notice Frederick the Great praising FW as king, and modeling himself on FW to a significant degree. He's also going to notice how everyone is keeping their coffins together through the centuries and speaking of them as the two greatest things that ever happened to Prussia/Germany. (Even now that the coffins are no longer side by side, they're still way too close for my tastes.) Given all this, and his predisposition to think Fritz was going to do fine as king, I feel like future FW starts patting himself on the shoulder. Otherwise he has to admit the rehabilitation failed, and everything he did was for naught. And rationalization is a huge force in human psychology.

I suspect FW ends up with the same attitude toward Fritz that Fritz has toward him: "Great king...wow, there were some problems, but all in all, A+ job, fellow Hohenzollern."

Speaking of rationalization, I also wonder how much mileage FW can get out of that historical claim to Silesia. :P

Re: More Book Reports: AW bio, Fritz and Heinrich double portrait/lengthy essay

[mildred_of_midgard]

...yeah, I can now totally see the parallels to what selenak has been telling us about Fritz/Heinrich.

I don't think the "cunning plan" was actually a cunning plan, btw, in either case. I think in both cases the abusers had some warm-and-fuzzies, aka a love-hate relationship, and the acts of affection were genuine. And staring your own mortality in the face is something that warms a lot of people toward their family members, and Fritz and FW were no exceptions, imo.