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

These book reports are THE BEST. :)))))))

Hohenzollern family group dynamics are THE WORST. :((((((((

Heinrich and AW :((((( Just your saying Heinrich... really loved him above and beyond, same intensity as the Fritz/Wilhelmine relationship. ...yeah, when you said that I was like, now I do know where this is going :(

Amalie was present through most of it, and said report, in great detail, tearstained and with ink blots, is adressed to Fritz. It doesn't include a direct accusation, but Ziebura thinks the very fact she writes this detailed has a "this is your fault, now at least learn what it was like" subtext.

Heinrich, of course, did not need subtext.

They just all need lots and lots of hugs and therapy :(

Fritz, you know, the sibling YOU love? You've killed her along with the one I loved best as well. Think about that while you're in the field. Think long and hard.

Oh. Ouch. OUCH.

"The Count appeared as a present from heaven to him, the evening of his life had arrived, but behold, the setting sun gave him once more a beam of warming light."

Aww, that is sweet! And I love the picture of old!Heinrich as an eccentric gentleman with impeccable manners <3 Also, lol for Heinrich's German.

(uh, my French pronounciation is worse than my reading comprehension -- do they not rhyme because of the difference between "te" and "tte," and/or is there some slight difference in the vowel? I suck so badly at vowels!)

My French pronounciation isn't better than yours (or Fritzes). I was somewhat stumped as well but transcribed Ziebura paraphrasing Voltaire.

And yes, no kidding about family therapy and hugs. And no one has access to any weapons. Music, otoh, is not just permitted but encouraged.

And yes, no kidding about family therapy and hugs. And no one has access to any weapons. Music, otoh, is not just permitted but encouraged.

This, this, and this!

See, that's why Mozart in any shape would come in handy. ;) On a very different musical note, seems the BBC has been listening to those rap battles of historical celebrities as well, for they made one of their own about the beginning of World War I, here. It does contain one bit pointing out this started out in many ways as a war of cousins!

Lol! Poor Granny.

And she'd died in Willy's arms, too.

Btw, here's a footnote German wiki has on the hot page:

"Der „schöne Marwitz“ ist vermutlich identisch mit dem auf dem Rheinsberger Obelisken ohne Nennung seines Vornamens als "Quartiermeister bei der Armee des Königs" mit der Lebensspanne 1724-1759 erwähnten Angehörigen der Familie von der Marwitz."

("Beautiful Marwitz" is probably identical with the Marwitz family member included on the Rheinsberg Obelisk without a mention of his first name as "Quatermaster with the army of the King" and a life span of 1724 to 1759.")

Otoh the Wiki entry for the entire Marwitz family thinks the Obelisk Marwitz is "The Black Marwitz" who "soll dem König verweigerte haben, bei Hochkirch das Lager für die Preußische Armee aufzuschlagen, was sich durch den anschließenden Überfall bei Hochkirch als Weise erwies" ("is supposed to have refused to the King to make camp for the Prussian army at Hochkirch, which due to the later attack on Hochkirch turned out to have been a wise decision"). Which would fit with the general Obelisk theme of "People who were fucked over by Fritz" in a metaphorical, not literal way better.

Another footnote says the four letters from Fritz to Heinrich re: Marwitz the hot page were written in March 1746, which, if you'll recall, means this was happening simultanously to the end phase of his argument with Wilhelmine, featuring Marwitz the cheating lady in waiting. Or, was Wilhelmine would say, "the sympathy of our fates strikes again".

Lastly, two more bits of trivia about Hohenzollerns being just... well... so Heinrich in his old excentric gentleman phase has many to be expected cultural hobbies, and one really weird one. Apparantly he liked to look at the occasional corpse in Rheinsberg. But not until some make-up had been put on the dead fellow to make him look less corpse-like.

And secondly, on a note of "it's sweet, but also yet another example of 'you two were a scandal that never happened due to your orientation'": Fritz writes to Wilhelmine in the early 1730s that she should send him a ribbon of hers she's worn at least 14 days.

Edited 2019-11-24 11:45 (UTC)

Which would fit with the general Obelisk theme of "People who were fucked over by Fritz" in a metaphorical, not literal way better.

Yeah, I'm going to go with "probably the military context," but you never know. At least one biographer seems to think the Marwitz episode is when Heinrich's hatred of Fritz started, so..."Oh, how I hate you, let this obelisk count the ways."

Btw, it occurred to me that on the subject of the Fritz/Heinrich and FW/Fritz parallels, my feelings in this fandom can be summed up thusly:

Re Fritz: Hate the sin, love the sinner.
Re FW: HATE the sinner!

That's fair, right? :P

the four letters from Fritz to Heinrich re: Marwitz the hot page were written in March 1746

My sources also say March 1746. I went to look at his personal correspondence to reread the letters in question (I don't remember them being fully enlightening last time, but weak French + Google was probably not helping)--and I couldn't find them. I had "Marwitz" in my search history, proving that I did look them up before, but this time I'm only seeing a handful of letters from 1745-1746, and none of them seem to involve hot pages, and none of the 1746 ones are dated.

I'm terribly confused, because I could have sworn I read at least the letter where Fritz was saying "gonorrhea and flabby body" to Heinrich, and have some vague memory of the letter beyond that line...and yet now I can't find it. Perhaps I read it quoted somewhere else? I know I was looking into the lust triangle episode a while back. Anyway. I'm sure we'll get it sorted one day, thanks to your diligent efforts!

Also. March 1746 is not just the time of the Wilhelmine/Margrave/Marwitz love triangle. I *just* realized. It's also, generally speaking, the time of Darget.

As recounted here, December 1745 is when the French send Darget to (allegedly) try to seduce Fritz into not abandoning their alliance; January 1746 is when Darget comes to Berlin to ~~make an alliance of his own~~ be Fritz's librarian. So now I'm imagining...

Fritz: Look, I just won a war and my people are calling me "the Great"--of course I'm super revved up. Ima look at some pretty boys and build a palace, fuck yeah. \o/

Chronology is everything. :-PPP

(Also Fritz around this time: Hey, Algarotti!)

Apparantly he liked to look at the occasional corpse in Rheinsberg. But not until some make-up had been put on the dead fellow to make him look less corpse-like.

...I mean, at this point all I can do is stare at him and go, "I guess that's far from the weirdest thing a Hohenzollern ever did. You do you, Heinrich." (Do you need some therapy?)

it's sweet, but also yet another example of 'you two were a scandal that never happened due to your orientation'

Oh, you Hohenzollerns.

So when you said Heinrich and AW had a relationship of the same intensity as Fritz/Wilhelmine, and this time one has the right orientation and the other is bi according to at least one gossipy sensationalist...does that mean Heinrich/AW scandal fodder yes/no/maybe?

The problem is that someone removed all the AW/Heinrich correspondance from the archives. Now it's entirely possible that they burned their respective letters themselves. (After all, that's why we don't have any Wilhelmine letters pre late 1732, even discounting the big letter fire of 1730 - Fritz burned them all at her request for FW reasons - and hardly any Fritz letters - ditto.) But it's also possible the letters were destroyed later. But it's still odd that their correspondances with practically every other family member survives in large parts, including some explicit "Fritz sucks!" letters to brother Ferdinand.

re: AW's sexuality, Ziebura doesn't mention any m/m affairs for him, but she certainly describes him as an ally in this regard. Because, you see, with his usual talent of picking teachers for his kids who were supposed to do one thing and who did then just the opposite when his back was turned, FW hired a steward for teenage AW and his kid brothers Heinrich and Ferdinand who was supposed to ensure their utter chastity, one Lt. von Kreyzen. Writes FW, in a letter still preserved:

To that end, he must never let Prince Wilhelm sleep alone at night, he shall sleep in the same room as the prince, always, and he must see and be responsible for the Prince Wilhelm not to go to whores, fornicate, or commit silent sins. (...) If he visits places with the prince, he is never to leave him alone. The prince is to talk to everyone but never to have any sinful discourses.

I take it "silent sins" means masturbation. Now, you probably guessed where this is going: Kreyzen turns out to be gay. Very gay. As for sinful discourses, here's AW some years later, writing to brother Ferdinand who at that point is the sole one left in von Kreyzen's charge, inviting the both of them to visit him, AW, at the military revue in Spandau, and adding as a postscript/inducement to Kreyzen: "I'm holding a beautiful ass and fleshy tighs ready for him." And at another opportunity, writing to Kreyzen directly: "My prettiest fellows expect your thick priapus full of impatience."

Edited 2019-11-25 07:11 (UTC)

FW hired a steward for teenage AW and his kid brothers Heinrich and Ferdinand who was supposed to ensure their utter chastity

Oh LOLOLOL it's Keyserlingk all over again!

cahn, FW did the same thing with Fritz. The guy appointed to sleep next to teenage Fritz and keep him chaste, as well as well-behaved by FW standards in general, ended up being gay (probably? definitely?), well educated and cultured, and named in future Fritz's list of "the 6 I have loved the most."

Man. Whatever the opposite of gaydar is, FW had an unerring instinct for it, didn't he?

No kidding. Incidentally, you probably know this, but von Krockow's double portrait with introductory FW chapter has reminded me again: back when FW took up pastel painting as a late hobby (not least due to being incapacitated so much by his various illnesses), he portrayed every. single. Potsdam. Giant. I mean.

Really? Omg, I knew he painted them, but I had not learned or forgotten it was every single one.

OMG, FW, your kids are all showing signs of being attracted to each other and/or their nieces, and you're drooling over your tall guards, HALP.

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

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

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

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

cahn - 2019-11-29 03:57 (UTC) - Expand

WHAT
...yeah, have I mentioned repressed? OMG.

OMG. Oh FW. LOL. Everything you tell me about him makes me think more and more that he was repressing all kinds of things :P ("This guy seems ~~attractive~~ ~~like someone I'd like to see around the place~~ like a good steward for my teenage boy!")

OMG LOOOOOL I love your take on this! That could totally be it!

Heh. I suppose it isn't exactly FW's fault, and of course I'm getting a biased view here with most of my info coming from people who like Fritz and don't like FW :P but he doesn't seem to really have the endearing qualities Fritz does. (And for all his extremely many faults, he did have endearing qualities.)

(This is, of course, a dare for both of you! Prove me wrong :P :D )
(I do not find the Potsdam giants endearing, I find them disturbing.)

My biggest problem is that I find Fritz's extremely many faults endearing too, seeing as how he is safely long dead and thus practically fictional in my mental ontology. I'm now more inclined to see them as faults than I was as a teenager *cough*, but they still give me warm and fuzzies as long as they aren't actively harming anyone currently living. (Everyone in the 18th century just lived in hell, that's all there is to it.)

I mean, between the fact that I'm still fascinated by military history, and the fact that I sometimes outright cheer for the villains in movies...Fritz fits right into my brain's "problematic faves <333" slot, and he hasn't budged yet.

Prove me wrong :P :D

Ahem.

selenak can prove you wrong, if she likes. I'm standing over here glaring at FW and hugging Fritz and Katte protectively. (And whispering in Fritz's ear, or more accurately having my Athena muse whisper, "You know, if you did such-and-such, you could probably hold Silesia with a lower death toll, and maybe Bohemia and Saxony too." While glancing shiftily around in case my actual principles can hear me. :PP)

(Athena's backstory with FW in this unwritten AU has kind of a hilarious intersection with some of today's topics, and it's been making me laugh.)

So when I say, "hate the sin," I mean on principle, not why I'm in this fandom. Purely from a fandom perspective, I'm more like: "Go and sin no lots more!" :-PP

I don't know about endearing, though if you like, you could use "FW, surprise! midwife" here - according to Wilhelmine, SD hadn't realised she was pregnant with Amalie until shortly before giving birth, because she thought it was the change and the stress and she was at last past childbirth, which meant there were zilch preparations, which meant when baby Amalie came, SD had to be birth assisted by one lady in waiting and her husband, who didn't budge and came through on that occasion.

But while Prussia's foremost abusive father, FW certainly was remarkable, and not in the ironic or "remarkably awful" sense, and prettty much unique among the princes of his time, in applying hardcore protestant work ethics to himself as well as his entire kingdom, making having a sense of duty, of service to the state, as a part of national self definition in a way that was not there for any other realm of the era. Even Peter the Great, that other worker and reformer on the throne of FW's generation, didn't abandon personal splendour (I mean, during military campaigns he did, but not when residing somewhere); FW took the whole "restoring my overdebted kingdom" thing to mean "thriftiness starts with me".) Von Krockow makes an intriguing comparison to Robesspierre, starting with a quote comparison daring the reader to guess whether it was FW or Max the revolutionary who said this, and I can totally see his point. They are pretty similar both in the ways they are remarkable and in the ways they are appalling, and FW was a revolutionary from the top in the context of his time and what he was trying to achieve.

(The quote: "We want to replace egoism by moral in our country, honor by decency, habits by princples, etiquette by duty, enforced tradition by the rule of common sense, the condemnation of misfortune by the condamnation of vice (...) and so-called good society by good people.")

(Obvious problem for both FW and Robespierre, and all ideologues - zero tolerance towards people who didn't want to be reformed to their way of thinking.)

Another unironic remarkable thing about FW is that for all his militarization of an entire country, and his army fetish, he didn't start a single war. He only fought in wars others had started, usually in his capacity of being a prince of the HRE and being called for duty by MT's dad. Now you'd think that once he had created the most modern army of Europe, he'd been dying to try it out, not least because there were two pieces of land he thought he had a claim on (neither of them Silesia btw) and hoped, in vain, MT's dad would give him as reward for his consistent loyalty, but no. If you were a soldier in FW's army, you might have been kidnapped for your body size or otherwise gang pressed, but you had a pretty good chance of survival, which, err, changed once his successor got on the throne.

(Von Krockow in his ponderings on Prussia per se states that for good or ill, the emergence of Prussia as a European power and its subsequent rise to THE German power, dominating all the others and changing them in its image, really depended on the combination of FW and Fritz as monarchs following each other. If F1 had been followed by a successor like himself, Prussia had never become more than a tiny overindebted principality with delusions of grandeur for calling itself a kingdom instead of a dukedom. If FW had been followed by "an avarage, or just an honorable man", then "Maria Theresia ascends to the throne untroubled, the Pragmatic Sanction holds" because no one wants to be the first to break it, and "Prussia remains a third rate German principality", financially sound and with a great civil service for a generation, true, but not in any way a model for any of the others. Again, an argument can be made that this would have been better in the long term. But it is not what happened, and I can see von Krockow's point - which is not his alone but a pretty popular one among traditional historians - that the entirety of subsequent German history depended on that father-son combination.

Lastly, an anecdote he quotes about FW's death, which you may or may not find endearing: On his deathbed the pious soldier had a choral being sung for him, the song by Paul Gerhardt "Warum sollt ich mich grämen? Hab ich doch Christum noch..." ("Why should I mourn? For I have Christ with me...") In the second verse, the lines go "Nude I lie on the floor/as I came into this world, took my first breath/ nude will I leave it..." When hearing these words, the pain-tormented majesty rose once more and thundered: "What do you mean, nude? I arrive, of course, in uniform!"

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

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

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(uh, my French pronounciation is worse than my reading comprehension -- do they not rhyme because of the difference between "te" and "tte," and/or is there some slight difference in the vowel? I suck so badly at vowels!)

Short answer: they rhyme today but didn't necessarily rhyme in Voltaire's day.

Long answer...well, bear in mind that I had only one semester on the history of the French language--

selenak, my PhD was in historical linguistics--so the following explanation is derived from Wikipedia plus the 15-year-old hazy memory of a non-French speaker. But Wikipedia matches my memories closely enough that I'm just going to go with it.

Originally, back in Cicero's day in Latin, "t" and "tt" would have been pronounced differently, but by about the year 1000 they were pronounced the same in French. So Voltaire would not have heard any difference between the consonants. It's the vowels he would have cared about.

Now, the word "tête" comes from Latin "testa". Some time in the Middle Ages, "s" before a following consonant got turned to "h", pronounced "tehta".

Then the "h" stopped being pronounced, but to make up for the lost consonant, the preceding vowel went from a short vowel to a long vowel. This was represented by putting a circumflex over the vowel. So "tête" had a long vowel, and "trompette" a short vowel, for several hundred years, and the modern spelling difference reflects this historical difference.

Around Voltaire's time, French speakers stopped pronouncing vowel length differences. Like most sound changes, this took multiple generations and caught on gradually. There was a period when some people were pronouncing them the same, and some people were pronouncing them differently.

My guess (this is an educated guess) is that in ordinary, casual speech in France, and in German-speaking regions, the two words rhymed, but someone known for speaking the "best", i.e. conservative, French, like Voltaire, would still observe a difference, especially because they were spelled differently, and because the poets of preceding generations Voltaire and Fritz were emulating were not rhyming them.

Today, they rhyme in most dialects, including in Paris, and I know this not because I can pronounce French vowels*, but because I asked a friend who grew up just outside Paris to confirm Wikipedia.

* I barely even pronounce English vowels: people make fun of what vowels I rhyme and don't rhyme all the time. :P Case in point, I pronounce "sell" and "sail" the same. I have most but not all the mergers on this page.

Edited 2019-11-22 17:23 (UTC)

My measly three years of French at school and I are very impressed and salute you. (It was my last foreign language to learn, after Latin and English, and I never was more than rusty in it and have forgotten a lot, not least because unlike my English, I hardly practiced.) Thank you for coming through with the linguistic expertise!

My pleasure! The nice thing about historical linguistics is that you can know stuff without needing to know the language in question.

Your measly three years of French in a German (I assume) school probably far surpass my measlier two years of French in a not only American, but academically poor even by American standards, high school. That plus my one semester of French historical linguistics in college is about it for me and French.

My German background is even weirder: one semester of proper German in college, one semester on German syntax from a linguistic perspective (so a lot of diagramming sentences and reading up on different theories that account for where verbs go), one semester on reading academic German in grad school, two semesters of Middle High German, and a few semesters of even more remotely removed long dead Germanic languages: Old English, Old Norse/Icelandic, Gothic. ;) All of these give me a slight edge in reading German over an English speaker who had only that one semester of German 101, but leave me with a total German reading proficiency that is actually worse than my two years of high school French. Largely due to English having a far greater overlap in vocabulary with French, notwithstanding that it's a Germanic language.

I will never cease to complain that my graduate program:
- required nominal reading proficiency in French and German,
- failed to provide us with resources to acquire academic reading proficiency without taking years and years of irrelevant "When is the train coming?" undergraduate courses on spoken French/German that no one actually had time for,
- held the bar so low we could pass without actually being able to read French or German, thus giving us no incentive to prioritize reading proficiency over all the other things we were trying to cram into our years there.

And then we'd get random lectures like, "You know, you should also learn to read academic Russian," and we'd blink and stare at our advisors like..."I don't disagree. In principle."

I'm convinced I have the least knowledge of modern French and the most knowledge of older French of the three of us. :D

Hey, I had three and a half years of French in school! (One year I couldn't fit it in my schedule and it was with a tutor -- the lovely French teacher I'd mentioned before, who had retired at that point -- but because I wasn't taking it for credit we probably got through about half the curriculum.) I'm feeling very learned right now, having had the most French of the three of us! ;) :P

Of course I didn't keep it up, so it's not like I can read any better than either of you at this point :P And my pronunciation was always execrable.

Oh wow, that's super cool. My French teacher told me about the circumflex but I didn't know about any of the other stuff.

Historical linguistics is full of neat explanations for things, or at least I think so. When people want to know why such-and-such is, I take delight in being able to explain the history of the word over the last one to two thousand years. (This comes up a lot when I'm doing ESL with a French-speaking friend. He likes to joke that it's good to know there's usually a reason behind the chaos that is the English language, but that it's not scalable to expect all foreigners to get a PhD so the language can make sense to them!)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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