Frederick the Great, discussion post 6

[cahn]

...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

Comments

Re: Kattes

[cahn]

Holy cow, you are crazy. Both of you. In the best possible way. I love it <3 :D

Re: Kattes

[mildred_of_midgard]

Tbh, if I were feeling better, this probably wouldn't be happening. However, since I can't write fic, but I *can* look things up...things like this family tree and that even crazier 15-minute chronological map video keep happening. :P

Also, the collaboration with selenak on this detective work has been amaaaazing. Like you said, I have mad finding things skills, and she has mad translation and analysis and write-up skills, and together, we are Sherlock!

Re: Kattes

[selenak]

Love the family tree, have printed out the family tree!

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

[mildred_of_midgard]

Love the family tree, have printed out the family tree!

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

[mildred_of_midgard]

But if it was plague, and Hans Heinrich lost both his parents and his first wife to it - brrrr. Talk about trauma.

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.)