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Frederick the Great, discussion post 6
...I think we need another one (seriously, you guys, this is THE BEST) and I'd better make it now before I disappear into the wilds of music performance.
(also, as of this week there are two Frederician fics in the yuletide archive and eeeeeeeeeee)
(huh, only one of them is actually tagged with Frederick the Great even though two with Maria Theresia and Wilhelmine, eeeeeee this is awesome I CAN'T WAIT)
Frederick the Great masterpost
(also, as of this week there are two Frederician fics in the yuletide archive and eeeeeeeeeee)
(huh, only one of them is actually tagged with Frederick the Great even though two with Maria Theresia and Wilhelmine, eeeeeee this is awesome I CAN'T WAIT)
Frederick the Great masterpost
Re: Kattes
Oh, and I left out Heinrich Christoph's daughter, dammit. But okay, we don't know anything about her except her name: Dorothea Elisabeth. Anyway, today's labor of love:
I apologize for the crowding; I was afraid of running out of room for the notes, especially on the last one, and then my back pain wouldn't allow me to recopy everything. I would apologize for my handwriting, but that's kind of a lost cause. If you can't read anything, let me know.
Along the way, I discovered that Hans Heinrich's parents, Hans Hermann's paternal grandparents, died within 2 days of each other while the kids were still very young (Hans Heinrich only 2 years old). The first thing that came to mind was infectious disease. And then I remembered that the plague was still very much a thing in 1684. So I went and looked up to see if were any major outbreaks in Germany at the time. Sure enough, there was a huge wave starting in the Ottoman Empire and spreading northward through Europe from 1679 to 1684. Wikipedia tells me it ended in Germany in 1683. Well, January 1684 is definitely within a reasonable margin of error as far as I'm concerned.
Wikipedia also tells me that as part of this, there was a Great Plague of Vienna in 1679, which
So my new headcanon is Hans Heinrich's parents died of the plague. I'm actually surprised the two-year-old survived; kids are usually the most vulnerable. I wondered if maybe the kids got sent away, since they were nobility and could afford that. Or maybe the kids were already in small-village Wust being raised by staff/relatives and the parents were in Berlin/other big city doing military stuff. Or maybe the surviving kids just got lucky.
Anyway. Then I saw that the next plague outbreak in Germany was in 1707, and that jogged my memory. Wasn't that the year Hans Hermann's mom, Hans Heinrich's first wife, died? Yep, it was. Now, she could have died young (22 years old) of *anything*. Miscarriage, getting kicked by a horse, unpasteurized milk, bandits, anything. But if anyone is thinking of writing any Katte family fic, it might be worth knowing that Hans Heinrich's parents died during a plague year, as did his first wife. (It must have been a fairly stressful year for him in any case, now that he had a family of his own, and the plague was back.)
Another thing I noticed from doing the family tree: Hans Heinrich's first daughter was named Luise Charlotte, she died at age 6 weeks, and three daughters and one wife later, there's another Luise Charlotte, who has a happier fate. (She marries into the Bismarcks, but is not the ancestress of Otto--that's her aunt.)
Oh, and also, I very nearly put sparkly hearts around Hans Hermann, but given that redoing this would be painful (literally) and I might someday want to share it in a more serious business fashion, I refrained. But you should imagine sparkly hearts.
Apologies to your inboxes in advance: I will play with image sizing as needed to get it right after I see what it looks like when posted.
Re: Kattes
Re: Kattes
Also, the collaboration with
Re: Kattes
Plague in Vienna: you overestimate me, I don't know more than what wiki tells you, in fact, I knew less, the one bit of trivia I had handy was the Ach du lieber Augustin song having its origin there.
re: death of Hans Heinrich's parents - cool detective work, and yes, makes total sense for it to have been the plague, ditto for the wife. Mind you, the other guess for sudden deaths within days of each other would have been smallpox, because everyone got smallpox (including both Hohenzollerns and Habsburgs, oh, and Mozart just when he was between child and teenager - all descriptions of him mention that he had smallpox scars on his face for the rest of his life, contributing to the end of wonderboy cuteness, though not a single actor who has ever played Mozart ever bothered to get his face properly scarred) before inoculation really took off. But if it was plague, and Hans Heinrich lost both his parents and his first wife to it - brrrr. Talk about trauma.
Re: Kattes
Yay! Thank you for your role in providing much of the material for the annotations, as well as asking the questions that led me to come up with it. I was so hung up on letter forwarder being a general not as his final rank but as his 1730 rank, that it took you asking if cashiered general might be letter forwarding general for me to actually look up the source on letter forwarder. Which ended up being a key part in my ability to generate this tree.
you overestimate me, I don't know more than what wiki tells you,
But you knew it existed, which I didn't! I just knew there were plague outbreaks at the time, mostly because of the great London plague in 1666.
Mind you, the other guess for sudden deaths within days of each other would have been smallpox, because everyone got smallpox
Agreed, smallpox is definitely a major candidate.
Hans Hermann is also reported by Wilhelmine and Pöllnitz to have been visibly scarred by smallpox, which at least some tumblr fanart but no actors I've seen get right. (Ekaterina does make a point of including Peter III's infection and subsequent pockmarking.) Fritz and Wilhelmine seem to have avoided visible scarring.
The thing that made me think of looking for something other than smallpox, though, is that both parents would have had to have made it to 50 years old and 39 years old, respectively, without having been infected yet. That's perfectly possible, but it seems less than statistically likely? Or would you disagree?
There's also no shortage of other infectious diseases. (I would not live in pre-antibiotic and pre-vaccination days for anything.) Or being in a building that burned down. Or caught in a blizzard together and died of hypothermia. But plague is my headcanon.
But if it was plague, and Hans Heinrich lost both his parents and his first wife to it - brrrr.
I think it's fairly likely for his parents, but I have no real idea for his first wife. (I realized when writing this that she died even younger than her son, who made it all the way to 26. Ugh.)
Talk about trauma.
Yeah, I was thinking when I wrote up that hypothesis: it's not just abuse and war that lead to everyone having PTSD! The 14th century Black Death pandemic was the context in which Tuchman was developing her theory.
Re: Kattes
I forgot to mention: his first wife died November 5. His son died November 6. If he's the kind of guy to keep track of dates, that's got to be a rough couple days for him in subsequent years. Ditto for first wife's father Wartensleben, probably. (First wife's mother is long dead.)