cahn | Frederick the Great reveal post / discussion post 8

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Frederick the Great reveal post / discussion post 8

In the last several months, as anyone who reads this DW knows,

selenak and I have been part of this quite frankly amazing Frederick the Great fandom, and I sort of assumed that the two people in this fandom who actually knew anything, mildred and selenak, were going to write fics for Yuletide, and I (who know nothing except what they've told me in the last several months) was going to awesomely enjoy reading them. In fact, mildred wrote a Fredersdorf fic for selenak's prompt which I betaed, but then mildred's medical issues got bad enough to interfere with her writing fic (making the beta edits would have involved a substantial amount of rewrite), and she wrote a post lamenting she wasn't going to be able to produce any yuletide fic. Meanwhile, I had two fics that I was pretty sure were from

selenak, and I thought it would be a shame for her to write us fic and for her not to get any :(

So then mildred and I had this (very paraphrased) conversation (

mildred_of_midgard has her own account here, and she has promised to reproduce the actual conversation in comments to this post):

me: You know, we should really write something for selenak! Now that I've read what you wrote about Fredersdorf, I think I could take a stab at her Fredersdorf prompt, if you edited and otherwise helped me out with historical stuff and also if you don't mind it being way more about music than something you would write.
mildred: YES GOD YES ~~and also oh you sweet summer child thinking you know enough to write this~~. [Mildred was far FAR nicer than this in real life.] For starters, here are 3500 words [really!] of things I know for a fact you don't know about Fredersdorf.
me: ...I was clearly overoptimistic. But I can work with this. Um, also, all the creativity-generating bits of my brain are already being used for my assignment, so can you also come up with an idea for the fic and also answer all my historical questions?
mildred: Sure! While I'm thinking about this, have 2k more words of historical grounding! Ok, and here are some ideas too. In fact, here's a whole plot for you!
me: Great! *writes 4k words of the plot*
mildred and me, more-or-less in unison: You did all the hard parts!

Then mildred fixed all my extensive historical errors and was fortunately able in between various medical woes to add various parts like the entire Wilhelmine subtheme and the entire last scene, and we deleted some of my words, and then I wrote some more paragraphs about music at her request and edited some of her stuff. I estimate that I probably ended up writing ~4.5k of the final fic, and mildred ended up writing ~ 2k of it (does that sound about right?) Of course that does not count the... I have no idea how much historical consultantcy stuff mildred ended up writing in the end, but I imagine it was significantly upwards of 10k :P And of course she wrote the detailed endnotes :D It also does not count all the words written in comments to the google document where we argued things like that Fredersdorf should be more zen than mildred wanted to write him and less zen than I wanted to write him :)

Although mildred and I mostly agreed on things, I had final veto power (and I did wield it a couple of times), so any remaining problems should be thought of as mine :) I'm very curious, though, as to how evident the collaboration was, and how evident the seams were, as I think mildred and I have very different writing styles, but it went through enough editing passes and discussion that I suspect much of the differences got at least somewhat smoothed out?

Counterpoint for Two Flutes

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Greetings to you! This is Beginning_Returner.

From the looks of it, you've laid some pretty solid groundwork for your subject of interest. Now if you want to take your research further, I'd say you should cast your net further and check if scholars have conducted similar comparisons and what their conclusions were regarding the source texts you examine. Your work is clear and well put together, as to be expected from a fellow academic!

Catt and Voltaire do have a common thread: Fritz. He could have verbally recounted to them the same rendition of the story-- as time goes on, people tend to solidify a certain rendition of a memory in their minds.

As for the nephew and heir, it seems as though Selena is correct in her evaluation. I assume you've gone through mentions of the future FW II in Fritz's published letters here as well:

http://friedrich.uni-trier.de/de/oeuvres/

Now if you want to take your research further, I'd say you should cast your net further and check if scholars have conducted similar comparisons and what their conclusions were regarding the source texts you examine. Your work is clear and well put together, as to be expected from a fellow academic!

Thanks! Next up would definitely be a literature survey, but as I mentioned to

iberiandoctor in a different thread on this post, "I would definitely need a German [I meant to say German-speaking] co-author, for things like the literature survey, and inspecting primary materials."

Catt and Voltaire do have a common thread: Fritz. He could have verbally recounted to them the same rendition of the story-- as time goes on, people tend to solidify a certain rendition of a memory in their minds.

Yep, that's exactly what I think! I put that forward as the most likely scenario in my introduction to the Catt & Voltaire comment. I also mentioned, in a different thread that I didn't link you to, that Fritz might have had a set version of events he ran through when he wanted to talk about it. That's not unusual, especially for trauma.

As for the nephew and heir, it seems as though Selena is correct in her evaluation. I assume you've gone through mentions of the future FW II in Fritz's published letters here as well:

I think Selena's question was: in his diary, does Catt record Fritz saying nice things about FW2? Or are these possibly words Catt put in his mouth later, after FW2 was king? Because the rest of what Fritz has to say about FW2 is not so complimentary, and Catt doesn't seem to have a problem putting words into Fritz's mouth.

The letters: we have definitely read extensive excerpts quoted by other sources, Selena has access to some of the letters in German translation, I've Google-translated chunks of correspondents I'm interested in, but none of us have the French to have read them all beginning to end. However! This may change, as last week I wrote a program that will generate a single file containing all the letters for a given correspondent, with French and Google-translated English interleaved, which is making reading his correspondence muuuch easier for those of us who don't have adequate French for the original. (We all had about 2-3 years' worth of French in school.)

selenak, if you have requests for any correspondents, let me know! I've sent Wilhelmine to

cahn, and am starting on Suhm myself, as my concentration permits. There will hopefully be a Suhm write-up soon.

I think Selena's question was: in his diary, does Catt record Fritz saying nice things about FW2? Or are these possibly words Catt put in his mouth later, after FW2 was king? Because the rest of what Fritz has to say about FW2 is not so complimentary, and Catt doesn't seem to have a problem putting words into Fritz's mouth.

Yes, that's what I meant, though considering FW2 died in 1797, and his son FW3 was as fond of him as FW2 was of Fritz (surprise!), Catt, who as I understand it wrote his memoirs much later than 1797, has at least not the reason of wanting favor from (dead) FW2. Unless he feels sorry for him after the fact, since in the 19th century FW2's reputation was as Fritz had declared it to be when alive (he didn't start to get good press until the 20th century got more Fritz-sceptical).

Correspondants: AW and Heinrich come to mind...

No, Catt died in 1795, at least according to Wikipedia. (I suppose I could check his memoirs, but I'm multitasking rn.) Wikipedia says he also died in Potsdam, which suggests the memoirs may have been written, or at least edited, while FW2 was king.

AW & Heinrich: will get on it!

Okay, if Catt died before FW2 did, and in Potsdam, to boot, then he DEFINITELY has a motive for letting Fritz be complimentary about young FW.

(In fairness: again, maybe Fritz was feeling both guilty on AW‘s behalf and sentimental. Lehndorff, btw, is very fond of young FW, and says a lot of nice things about him, too, but then Lehndorff isn‘t on the record for dissing him all the time, either, and is consistent there. (He does diss Borck, the man Fritz put in charge of young FW‘s education, though, for making fun of him (FW) all the time when he‘s clumsy and teaching him to make fun of other people when they make mistakes instead of encouraging him to be kind.)

No need to rush, take your time.

he DEFINITELY has a motive for letting Fritz be complimentary about young FW

I agree!

Now, the chronology is that the diary would have been written 1758-1760; the memoirs we don't know when they were composed, but 1786 is suggested as a possible date for the composition or revision; Catt is estranged from Fritz in 1782; Catt dies in 1795 in Potsdam; the memoirs weren't published until 1885.

So there's a very good chance editing was happening when Catt was 1) pissed off at Fritz, 2) sucking up to FW.

So that's why the question is: do the diaries contain these mentions of 1758-1760 Fritz being nice to FW2 when speaking of him to Catt?

teaching him to make fun of other people when they make mistakes instead of encouraging him to be kind

The traumatized previous generation traumatizing the next generation, and on and on it goes.

So there's a very good chance editing was happening when Catt was 1) pissed off at Fritz, 2) sucking up to FW.

German wiki - but not English wiki - tells me about Catt that „1789 ernannte ihn der König Friedrich Wilhelm II. zum Kantor der Stiftskirche St. Sebastian in Magdeburg“, so basically: gave him a job after the memoirs were written. German wiki also tells me that Catt‘s brother in law Pierre Jerèmie Hainchelin, who died in 1787, was, before becoming a highly regarded and high ranking Prussian civil servant, the personal secretary of, wait for it, AW until AW‘s death. Which presumably is why in the memoirs, Fritz just happens to declare that if AW instead of „evil advisors“ would have had only honest folk like Hainchelin with him, his life would have been calmer and his mind would not have been set against Fritz at all.

*am not sure whether I‘m side-eying Catt or Fritz more now*

You can side-eye both of them! It's legit!

Also, wow, missed that about Hainchelin. See, the more we dig, the more we find!

*side-eyes everyone*

According to wiki, Hainchelin's family was a member of the "French Colony", i.e. those Huguenots who'd been kicked out by Louis XIV and had come to Prussia thanks to the Great Elector. (Same for the much later Fontane, btw, for both of his parents.) So despite the name, he was actually a born Prussian. After AW's death, went on to have a good career in the civil service, as I said, and died in office 40 years later. Now, what I'm assuming Catt did was recording an original Fritz remark like "if he didn't have evil advisors" (tm), and in the memoirs beefing it up to "if he only had good guys around him like my bro-in-law instead of evil advisors!" The evil advisors bit was something Fritz resorted to in other letters as well as an excuse, so that bit rings authentic.

Incidentally, on the other end of the scale, blaming "evil advisors" for Fritz' behavior towards AW was also a thing for Lehndorff, who cast Winderfeldt as evil advisor (tm), presumably because Winterfeldt was the one reading out the charges against AW at the casheering. (Also Heinrich couldn't stand him, which was bound to influence Lehndorff's opinion.) "Evil advisors" are really such a useful trope if you want to deflect blame.

But going back to Catt, the list of examples of him being, hm, somewhat economic with the truth keep growing, so I wonder why modern biographers point out Wilhelmine is not always reliable (due to writing from memory, dramatic exaggaration or what not) but not Catt? Why is he always accepted as the horse's mouth? Or did I miss him being presented as flawed as well?

I've seen him presented as flawed (I'm forgetting where), but I definitely overestimated the extent to which he is actually the horse's mouth, and you're right that others have too. Sexism aside, the general perception may be because we know Wilhelmine was writing when she was estranged from Fritz and had limited access to sources, and often about events for which she was not present, whereas Catt keeps talking in his memoirs about the extensive and detailed diary he kept for events at which he was present. The number of people who've done the "waaait a minute!" line by line comparison between diary and memoirs is probably less than ideal.

ETA: I think there's also the fact that there's a long tradition of pointing out that Wilhelmine (and Pöllnitz) are inaccurate: e.g. Carlyle and Fontane do it, whereas Catt's memoirs weren't published until almost the twentieth century. So I think modern biographers are also copying older biographers with W and P.

Edited 2020-01-08 08:54 (UTC)

Yessss Heinrich was totally going to be my next ask :D Mildred, I demand these too when they're done :D Voltaire also came to mind, of course!

Haha, I knew Heinrich was next on your list!

I will generate the files, put everything I have on Google Drive, and make sure you both have access. :D I'm also going to try to dump some other files there as soon as I can get my hands on them.

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Frederick the Great reveal post / discussion post 8

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