cahn | 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

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From:

mildred_of_midgard

Maybe he even had already started to write his own account but wouldn't publish it yet since Fritz paid his salary, and he let her read it?

Read the preface to the 1791 version. The publisher says these memoirs were apparently written in 1754, or at least that's the date on the frontispiece of the two manuscripts he compared before publishing. He's not sure why they haven't been published yet but have been languishing in libraries, but thinks it may be because people assumed they were just duplicates of the already published memoirs. Or some other reason. Who knows.

So, you know, it's possible Wilhelmine is Pollnitz's source. If she didn't show him her memoirs directly, he may have consulted her when he was starting work on his project, and she may have written him a letter, or they may have chatted in person or something. Or vice versa: she was writing her and consulted him while he happened to be working on his. A manuscript in 1754 doesn't mean the research wasn't already begun in 1745, when the topic is as broad as "The history of the last four kings" and runs to two volumes.

I feel like W & P are definitely consulting, though, and not just orally but in writing. Like, if they were chatting in person, one or both went back to their desks in the evenings and wrote down what they had talked about while it was still fresh.

And then T got ahold of something and decided to summarize it. Iirc, he follows P more closely than W (who has a bunch of material that neither of them do), which is consistent with P being published. Or just with W caring a whole lot more about what her brother went through emotionally.

Omg, you know what? T is like P in being shorter than W and far less interested in recounting every single detail, but in the material they all three cover...well, I haven't gone through all three systematically, line by line, but in everything I've checked so far, *textually*, T is much closer to W than P. Like, W and P might have talked about it and taken notes that night. A lot of times it's the same content, slightly different phrasing. But where W and P diverge, I keep seeing T follow W.

Did he have access to her memoirs? I know you said Heinrich and FW2 got a hold of them, and that's during T's lifetime. What year is that? Okay, Wikipedia says that "On 16 January 1791, Alexander sold his Margraviate to Prussia." Which means Wilhelmine's memoirs became available to the immediate family the same year Pöllnitz's became available to the general public.

T's entry says he was living in Paris at the time. Not exactly leaning over Heinrich's shoulder while he read W.

WTF?

I need to sit down and go over these three sources systematically, before I start drawing conclusions about who's copying whom. Otherwise, I'm going to joke that like your anonymous manuscript by Voltaire suggesting having affairs with the family and then with Fritz is a path to success, there was a top-secret manuscript passed around explaining all the things you need to know if you're going to live with Fritz that you're not allowed to talk about. :P

From:

selenak

I know you said Heinrich and FW2 got a hold of them, and that's during T's lifetime. What year is that?

Sorry, I returned my Heinrich bio by Ziebura along with the other books to the library and can't look it up. But I don't think it was as early as that (1791), though; consider that the memoirs had to be found first, and brought to the attention of FW2, who in turn forwarded them to Heinrich. I assume whoever was in charge of going through the Bayreuth heritage first looked for valuables.

As Heinrich did not know Wilhelmine had written her memoirs before that, though - nor did, it seems, anyone else of the Hohenzollern family - I assume she didn't share them even with a private select circle. Which is the one thing that makes me hesitate to assume she showed them to Pöllnitz. Like Trenck, he was a blabbermouth. I mean, he was probably her source for the number of illegitimate kids August had, courtesy of his trashy tell all La Saxe Galante. Not the guy you want to confide in that you're writing "Our Insane Family" type of memoirs yourself. Especially since things are so tense with Brother Fritz right then anyway.

This being said: can see her ask him to correspond with her about the sad events just because. Pöllnitz rarely needed an invitation to chat about history.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Yeah, that's why I was trying to come up with alternatives to her showing him her memoirs, in the form of them chatting about things that happened, or exchanging letters, which they then both used as material for their respective memoirs. I agree that he likely didn't get his hands on a manuscript or even know there was one.

From:

selenak

The more I think about it the more likely it is. It's the early 1740s, Wilhelmine needs a non-Fritz source about how things went down in Küstrin, but she can't exactly ask the officers who served there (if she knew their names or them) without potentially alerting Fritz. Otoh, Pöllnitz doesn't even need an invitation to talk about the past, just give him a cue and he spills the stories. And he's the go-to guy for stories for her family anyway, so: no one, including him, will consider this unusual behavior on her part.

(Liselotte who knew him when she was old and he was young and at the French court while her son was Regent for kid Louis XV. said about him, according to German wiki, "he can talk, and he talks a great deal"; German wiki adds he had the same opinion about her.)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Yes, this all makes perfect sense to me, especially Pöllnitz as go-to guy.

Now we just need to figure out what Thiébault's doing, but that'll have to wait for my close reading of the three texts.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

I did the close reading! Aaaand, it's about 10,000 words and needs to be spread across about a dozen comments for the sake of organization. I guess I should wait for the next Frederick post in 5 days, when the YT collection opens? This one is already getting overloaded, and I don't want to start a new meaty discussion at 358 comments.

Anyway, it was a very instructive exercise, and I got some interesting ideas out of it.

From:

cahn

Good thinking. Definitely wait for the next post. Ugh, should I start a new post now? I'd kind of prefer not to until I have a little time to respond to all the current comments! Like, I go underground for a week to do Music + Yuletide and suddenly there's ALL THIS NEW EXCITING RESEARCH from the sensationalistic researchers!

From:

mildred_of_midgard

LOOL

No, as much as I'm impatient to share my exciting research, I've got a huge backlog of comments to reply to as well. I thought about asking you for an early post, but then I figured waiting a few days would give me a chance to try to go through my backlog, and do what I can in my current state to catch up.

...Possibly we are all overwhelmed by the awesomeness of this fandom. :P