After doing all this analysis, these are my current thoughts, subject to change.
Pöllnitz, Wilhelmine, and Thiébault are not independent accounts. This fact has important implications when trying to figure out what really happened. In the comparative method, not all sources are created equal. In the absence of any external evidence for the spelling of Schack's name, the naive approach would be to say that if three sources have "Schenk" and one source has "Schack", "Schenk" wins. But one of the tenets of the comparative method is that if all three sources are more closely related to each other than to any other source, they only count as one source.
That means if P, W, and T all report something happening that either contradicts our other sources, or isn't found elsewhere, all three only count as one report.
The comparative method tells us that Wilhelmine and Thiébault are more closely related than any two other sources. It doesn't tell us whether Wilhelmine is drawing on Thiébault (impossible because of chronology), Thiébault is drawing on Wilhelmine (unlikely but not impossible), or both are drawing on some third, unknown-to-us source.
There is no way Thiébault and Wilhelmine came up with language that similar on accident, or even just by talking to the same people. Those passages are textually linked. Wilhelmine and Pöllnitz are probably textually linked, but maybe orally with a relatively short time from oral recounting to writing.
I can't tell what comes from Wilhelmine to Pöllnitz or vice versa. I *really* can't tell what's up with the very close similarities between Thiébault and Wilhelmine. Either he's got a copy of her text in front of him, or there's a third source they're both working with. I really don't see any other way.
By the way, I haven't systematically examined anything other than the Katte execution, but unsurprisingly, from my glances at surrounding text, Thiébault follows Wilhelmine equally closely when talking about Friedrich's later imprisonment and rehabilitation at Küstrin, after the execution. It would be interesting to see just how much material he draws from her or that mysterious third source.
Münchow was most likely only a few years old when these events happened. He claims to have been present, and so it's possible he has vivid visual memories of the events, but they will be incomplete. We don't know how long he lived at Küstrin, but he may be a reliable source as to the layout. But for events that took place that day, words that were spoken, orders that were given, he is at best a secondhand source reporting, decades later, what he heard from his father, and at worst using his powers of deduction when he doesn't have firsthand facts.
Factual mistakes in his account include: - He underestimates the time that Friedrich spent at Küstrin, which was 18 months (Late August/early September 1730 to February 1732.) - He deduces from his knowledge of people's characters that Friedrich Wilhelm must not have given the order for the Crown Prince to watch the execution. We have a letter from Friedrich Wilhelm insisting that the Crown Prince must be able to see it "gut". It was not uncommon for him to give an order that his son was to be harmed in some way, and for his subordinates to try to mitigate it as best they could without risking themselves (or in many cases, at risk to themselves). It seems that Lepel was no exception.
It's hard to say what Catt and Voltaire's sources are. Catt's claims to be a written record of an oral account given by Friedrich himself. Voltaire doesn't say where he got his information, but it might well have been from Friedrich. Voltaire's spelling of "Kat" especially looks like a foreigner hearing a story orally and writing it down phonetically as best he can.
What's interesting is that both accounts limit themselves to Friedrich's perspective. Schack and Besser were both outside the fortress when these events took place, so they're good sources for what concerned Katte directly, but they're short on information about Friedrich. W/P/T have gathered material from multiple sources, and present both Katte's and Friedrich's POV. Catt and Voltaire, however, present only Friedrich's POV, which makes it even more likely that they heard the story from him. It's possible C and V are both drawing on some third, written, source. Least likely, but not impossible, is that Catt has read Voltaire's 1784 memoirs and decided to expand on it, filling in dialogue in Friedrich's mouth. There is nothing in his diary that I (with my weak French) can find to indicate that Friedrich talked to him about Katte.
But if C and V do reflect Friedrich's version of events, then I find the differences with the accounts of eyewitnesses Münchow, Schack, and Besser very striking. Most especially, the perennial question of whether the execution site was visible from Friedrich's window or not.
So here follows a possible scenario I came up with that would accommodate all the accounts, and all the external evidence we have about the reliability of each.
First, we've seen from the letter that Friedrich Wilhelm gave the order to Commandant Lepel that Friedrich was required to watch the execution.
In keeping with the part of Friedrich's childhood where everyone tried to shield him from the worst of his father's abuse, I posit that some combination of Lepel, Schack, and Münchow put their heads together and decided: 1) "Hell, no," 2) "We still have to be able to tell the King with a straight face that we made the Crown Prince watch."
They therefore decided on making Friedrich watch Katte walk by on his way to his death, and on executing Katte only a short distance from his window, but blocked from Friedrich's view by a wall. For reasons discussed above, I trust Münchow's memory of the topography of the fortress, which didn't change much over time, much more than I trust his memory of specific events that took place on November 6, 1730, when he was a child. So if Münchow says the execution took place only 30-50 paces away, but with an intervening wall, I'm inclined to believe him. From the perspective of those who made the decision, allowing Friedrich to watch Katte's procession but not his execution would count as an act of mercy, by allowing Friedrich and Katte to say farewell, and sparing him the torture of watching the blood spray.
This would allow all witnesses reporting to the King to agree that Katte was executed only 30-50 paces from the Crown Prince's window, and that the Prince was taken to the window, that he saw Katte, and that his head was held to the window. No need to mention that intervening wall that meant the execution itself happened out of his sight.
I posit that Friedrich, who was not given a lot of information on the morning of November 6, did not know of this plan. He assumed when the officers entered the room that he was to be executed. He was set straight on that point, but when they took him to the window and held his head there, and Katte walked by on his way to his death, he assumed that they were going to make him watch the execution itself. In fact, they may have told him there was an order to that effect. He fainted before he could find out otherwise.
When he woke up, Katte's body was nowhere in sight, so he never did find out that Katte was executed on the other side of a wall.
He almost certainly told people that he initially believed he was about to be executed, since all the sources from his POV, P/W/T/C/V, agree on this point.
Much later, someone who is the source of P, W, and T, whether that's P, W, or a third party, who's never been to Küstrin, imaginatively fills in the blanks and recreates a scene that never happened, by putting together the following facts:
1) There were preparations for Katte's execution. 2) FW and his subordinates in Berlin all agreed on the fact that Friedrich was ordered to watch. 3) Friedrich said he was made to watch. 4) Friedrich said he believed he was going to die that day, before the officer coming into his room set him straight.
All these facts led someone to the conclusion that the preparations must have taken place in sight of Friedrich's window, and that he must have watched them with growing dread and a conviction that they were meant for him. Somewhere along the chain of transmission, someone decided that the preparations must have included a scaffold, like the other executions they'd seen or heard of. We know few people knew of the pile of sand, and none of them was Friedrich.
In reality, Friedrich did not see these preparations, which is why they're not in C & V. Nor did he see Katte's body when he woke up, much less as the first thing he saw. It was out of sight, and it had been covered by a black cloth, which the W/P/T source must have learned about (from some source other than Friedrich) but misinterpreted or misremembered as covering the scaffold.
It appears that the body was removed around 2 pm, as Friedrich Wilhelm had ordered, but that Friedrich would not have known of this.
The only other claim that there was a scaffold, outside of P/W/T, is V. Voltaire's scaffold isn't evidence for any kind of connection between his account and P/W/T, because that's the kind of detail that can be made up independently. Most people in the 18th century would have attended or at least frequently heard of executions involving scaffolds. The scaffold would therefore have been a familiar detail to them, which they would be prone to supplying in cases where one wasn't specified.
In textual criticism, we call this the principle of lectio difficilior potior: the more unlikely detail is the one more likely to be correct. People tend to replace unfamiliar things, like sand heaps, with familiar things, like scaffolds. So given two sand heap accounts and two scaffold accounts, even leaving aside the part where the sand heaps were in the eyewitness accounts and the scaffold accounts the non-eyewitness accounts, we'd be more likely to believe in the sand heap.
Voltaire is also, of course, the only one who says FW was present, but Voltaire is an outsider, writing when outside the country and without access to any archives or probably even many consultants, and gets so many details like this wrong that this particular error is unsurprising. Katte's last words to Friedrich are similar in spirit but different in letter among our sources. P/W/T ("si j'avois mille vies, je les sacrifierois pour vous.") we know were not present. M ("La mort est douce pur un si aimable Prince.") was present but a small child. I would give a lot to know where Fontane's "je meurs avec mille plaisirs pour vous" comes from. Given the fact that it's in a footnote and the spelling, it does not appear to come from the report by Besser. However, Fontane is dedicated to using adult eyewitness sources in this chapter, so...I wonder.
The one thing I haven't been able to find anywhere except Wikipedia and sources derived from it (tumblr, DW, etc.) is "I die for you with joy in my heart," in French or in English. I would love it if anybody even knew of a modern biography that predates Wikipedia and has this source.
Katte Textual Criticism: Conclusions and Speculations (DO NOT REPLY)
Pöllnitz, Wilhelmine, and Thiébault are not independent accounts. This fact has important implications when trying to figure out what really happened. In the comparative method, not all sources are created equal. In the absence of any external evidence for the spelling of Schack's name, the naive approach would be to say that if three sources have "Schenk" and one source has "Schack", "Schenk" wins. But one of the tenets of the comparative method is that if all three sources are more closely related to each other than to any other source, they only count as one source.
That means if P, W, and T all report something happening that either contradicts our other sources, or isn't found elsewhere, all three only count as one report.
The comparative method tells us that Wilhelmine and Thiébault are more closely related than any two other sources. It doesn't tell us whether Wilhelmine is drawing on Thiébault (impossible because of chronology), Thiébault is drawing on Wilhelmine (unlikely but not impossible), or both are drawing on some third, unknown-to-us source.
There is no way Thiébault and Wilhelmine came up with language that similar on accident, or even just by talking to the same people. Those passages are textually linked. Wilhelmine and Pöllnitz are probably textually linked, but maybe orally with a relatively short time from oral recounting to writing.
I can't tell what comes from Wilhelmine to Pöllnitz or vice versa. I *really* can't tell what's up with the very close similarities between Thiébault and Wilhelmine. Either he's got a copy of her text in front of him, or there's a third source they're both working with. I really don't see any other way.
By the way, I haven't systematically examined anything other than the Katte execution, but unsurprisingly, from my glances at surrounding text, Thiébault follows Wilhelmine equally closely when talking about Friedrich's later imprisonment and rehabilitation at Küstrin, after the execution. It would be interesting to see just how much material he draws from her or that mysterious third source.
Münchow was most likely only a few years old when these events happened. He claims to have been present, and so it's possible he has vivid visual memories of the events, but they will be incomplete. We don't know how long he lived at Küstrin, but he may be a reliable source as to the layout. But for events that took place that day, words that were spoken, orders that were given, he is at best a secondhand source reporting, decades later, what he heard from his father, and at worst using his powers of deduction when he doesn't have firsthand facts.
Factual mistakes in his account include:
- He underestimates the time that Friedrich spent at Küstrin, which was 18 months (Late August/early September 1730 to February 1732.)
- He deduces from his knowledge of people's characters that Friedrich Wilhelm must not have given the order for the Crown Prince to watch the execution. We have a letter from Friedrich Wilhelm insisting that the Crown Prince must be able to see it "gut". It was not uncommon for him to give an order that his son was to be harmed in some way, and for his subordinates to try to mitigate it as best they could without risking themselves (or in many cases, at risk to themselves). It seems that Lepel was no exception.
It's hard to say what Catt and Voltaire's sources are. Catt's claims to be a written record of an oral account given by Friedrich himself. Voltaire doesn't say where he got his information, but it might well have been from Friedrich. Voltaire's spelling of "Kat" especially looks like a foreigner hearing a story orally and writing it down phonetically as best he can.
What's interesting is that both accounts limit themselves to Friedrich's perspective. Schack and Besser were both outside the fortress when these events took place, so they're good sources for what concerned Katte directly, but they're short on information about Friedrich. W/P/T have gathered material from multiple sources, and present both Katte's and Friedrich's POV. Catt and Voltaire, however, present only Friedrich's POV, which makes it even more likely that they heard the story from him. It's possible C and V are both drawing on some third, written, source. Least likely, but not impossible, is that Catt has read Voltaire's 1784 memoirs and decided to expand on it, filling in dialogue in Friedrich's mouth. There is nothing in his diary that I (with my weak French) can find to indicate that Friedrich talked to him about Katte.
But if C and V do reflect Friedrich's version of events, then I find the differences with the accounts of eyewitnesses Münchow, Schack, and Besser very striking. Most especially, the perennial question of whether the execution site was visible from Friedrich's window or not.
So here follows a possible scenario I came up with that would accommodate all the accounts, and all the external evidence we have about the reliability of each.
First, we've seen from the letter that Friedrich Wilhelm gave the order to Commandant Lepel that Friedrich was required to watch the execution.
In keeping with the part of Friedrich's childhood where everyone tried to shield him from the worst of his father's abuse, I posit that some combination of Lepel, Schack, and Münchow put their heads together and decided: 1) "Hell, no," 2) "We still have to be able to tell the King with a straight face that we made the Crown Prince watch."
They therefore decided on making Friedrich watch Katte walk by on his way to his death, and on executing Katte only a short distance from his window, but blocked from Friedrich's view by a wall. For reasons discussed above, I trust Münchow's memory of the topography of the fortress, which didn't change much over time, much more than I trust his memory of specific events that took place on November 6, 1730, when he was a child. So if Münchow says the execution took place only 30-50 paces away, but with an intervening wall, I'm inclined to believe him. From the perspective of those who made the decision, allowing Friedrich to watch Katte's procession but not his execution would count as an act of mercy, by allowing Friedrich and Katte to say farewell, and sparing him the torture of watching the blood spray.
This would allow all witnesses reporting to the King to agree that Katte was executed only 30-50 paces from the Crown Prince's window, and that the Prince was taken to the window, that he saw Katte, and that his head was held to the window. No need to mention that intervening wall that meant the execution itself happened out of his sight.
I posit that Friedrich, who was not given a lot of information on the morning of November 6, did not know of this plan. He assumed when the officers entered the room that he was to be executed. He was set straight on that point, but when they took him to the window and held his head there, and Katte walked by on his way to his death, he assumed that they were going to make him watch the execution itself. In fact, they may have told him there was an order to that effect. He fainted before he could find out otherwise.
When he woke up, Katte's body was nowhere in sight, so he never did find out that Katte was executed on the other side of a wall.
He almost certainly told people that he initially believed he was about to be executed, since all the sources from his POV, P/W/T/C/V, agree on this point.
Much later, someone who is the source of P, W, and T, whether that's P, W, or a third party, who's never been to Küstrin, imaginatively fills in the blanks and recreates a scene that never happened, by putting together the following facts:
1) There were preparations for Katte's execution.
2) FW and his subordinates in Berlin all agreed on the fact that Friedrich was ordered to watch.
3) Friedrich said he was made to watch.
4) Friedrich said he believed he was going to die that day, before the officer coming into his room set him straight.
All these facts led someone to the conclusion that the preparations must have taken place in sight of Friedrich's window, and that he must have watched them with growing dread and a conviction that they were meant for him. Somewhere along the chain of transmission, someone decided that the preparations must have included a scaffold, like the other executions they'd seen or heard of. We know few people knew of the pile of sand, and none of them was Friedrich.
In reality, Friedrich did not see these preparations, which is why they're not in C & V. Nor did he see Katte's body when he woke up, much less as the first thing he saw. It was out of sight, and it had been covered by a black cloth, which the W/P/T source must have learned about (from some source other than Friedrich) but misinterpreted or misremembered as covering the scaffold.
It appears that the body was removed around 2 pm, as Friedrich Wilhelm had ordered, but that Friedrich would not have known of this.
The only other claim that there was a scaffold, outside of P/W/T, is V. Voltaire's scaffold isn't evidence for any kind of connection between his account and P/W/T, because that's the kind of detail that can be made up independently. Most people in the 18th century would have attended or at least frequently heard of executions involving scaffolds. The scaffold would therefore have been a familiar detail to them, which they would be prone to supplying in cases where one wasn't specified.
In textual criticism, we call this the principle of lectio difficilior potior: the more unlikely detail is the one more likely to be correct. People tend to replace unfamiliar things, like sand heaps, with familiar things, like scaffolds. So given two sand heap accounts and two scaffold accounts, even leaving aside the part where the sand heaps were in the eyewitness accounts and the scaffold accounts the non-eyewitness accounts, we'd be more likely to believe in the sand heap.
Voltaire is also, of course, the only one who says FW was present, but Voltaire is an outsider, writing when outside the country and without access to any archives or probably even many consultants, and gets so many details like this wrong that this particular error is unsurprising.
Katte's last words to Friedrich are similar in spirit but different in letter among our sources. P/W/T ("si j'avois mille vies, je les sacrifierois pour vous.") we know were not present. M ("La mort est douce pur un si aimable Prince.") was present but a small child. I would give a lot to know where Fontane's "je meurs avec mille plaisirs pour vous" comes from. Given the fact that it's in a footnote and the spelling, it does not appear to come from the report by Besser. However, Fontane is dedicated to using adult eyewitness sources in this chapter, so...I wonder.
The one thing I haven't been able to find anywhere except Wikipedia and sources derived from it (tumblr, DW, etc.) is "I die for you with joy in my heart," in French or in English. I would love it if anybody even knew of a modern biography that predates Wikipedia and has this source.