I seem to recall at least one major distortion (and not in a satiric way) in Voltaire's account - doesn't he claim FW was present in Küstrin to sadistically watch the execution?
Yes, he does, that's in my Voltaire write-up notes. It's the one part where he doesn't read like a summary of Catt. That said, I found a lot of these little details going wrong in Voltaire, and as you said, not just because of the satire. I was more struck that he actually matches another source so closely here, because he's so often doing his own thing as an outsider, and a hostile one at that.
Which he definitely was not, he was in Berlin busy terrorizing the rest of his family, but it's the kind of thing a dramatist probably couldn't resist letting happen. (I mean, at least one fanfic writer went there as well.)
Yep, I was going to mention the fanfic writer in my Voltaire write-up. ;)
The memoirs that cover the time from 1723 onwards, Mémoires pour servir a l’histoire de quatre dernier souverains de la maison de Brandenbourg, didn't appear until after his death in 1791, again according to German wiki. So: if German wiki is correct as to what the various Pöllnitz memoirs cover and when they appeared, Wilhelmine can't have used Pöllnitz' written account.
Ooooh. That is some good attention to detail there, thank you. But yes, because they knew each other, there's a good chance he let her read them or read them to her. Or that by talking together they converged on an account that was very recent in both their minds when they wrote. (There's too much detail they agree on that I can't believe could be them independently remembering what they heard back in 1730.) But if they were chatting or even engaging in extensive correspondence around the time they were writing, they could have both have written accounts that follow each other that closely.
And if Pöllnitz came out in 1791, and Thiébault in 1804 (and he died in 1807, so this at least wasn't posthumous), Thiébault could still have been relying on Pöllnitz, although that narrows the window in which he could have done so.
Thank you for looking for Münchow correspondence and trying to figure out who Nicolai is. Can you tell from anywhere in the Preuss volume itself what he might be referring to? Surely you can't just write "Siehe Münchow an Nicolai S. 530" and expect your readers to know what that is? Surely that's that an abbreviated reference you can put on page 45 because you've already spelled out the full reference earlier in your book?
Re: Katte's Death: The Documentary Hypothesis
Yes, he does, that's in my Voltaire write-up notes. It's the one part where he doesn't read like a summary of Catt. That said, I found a lot of these little details going wrong in Voltaire, and as you said, not just because of the satire. I was more struck that he actually matches another source so closely here, because he's so often doing his own thing as an outsider, and a hostile one at that.
Which he definitely was not, he was in Berlin busy terrorizing the rest of his family, but it's the kind of thing a dramatist probably couldn't resist letting happen. (I mean, at least one fanfic writer went there as well.)
Yep, I was going to mention the fanfic writer in my Voltaire write-up. ;)
The memoirs that cover the time from 1723 onwards, Mémoires pour servir a l’histoire de quatre dernier souverains de la maison de Brandenbourg, didn't appear until after his death in 1791, again according to German wiki. So: if German wiki is correct as to what the various Pöllnitz memoirs cover and when they appeared, Wilhelmine can't have used Pöllnitz' written account.
Ooooh. That is some good attention to detail there, thank you. But yes, because they knew each other, there's a good chance he let her read them or read them to her. Or that by talking together they converged on an account that was very recent in both their minds when they wrote. (There's too much detail they agree on that I can't believe could be them independently remembering what they heard back in 1730.) But if they were chatting or even engaging in extensive correspondence around the time they were writing, they could have both have written accounts that follow each other that closely.
And if Pöllnitz came out in 1791, and Thiébault in 1804 (and he died in 1807, so this at least wasn't posthumous), Thiébault could still have been relying on Pöllnitz, although that narrows the window in which he could have done so.
Thank you for looking for Münchow correspondence and trying to figure out who Nicolai is. Can you tell from anywhere in the Preuss volume itself what he might be referring to? Surely you can't just write "Siehe Münchow an Nicolai S. 530" and expect your readers to know what that is? Surely that's that an abbreviated reference you can put on page 45 because you've already spelled out the full reference earlier in your book?