Frederick the Great reveal post / discussion post 8

[cahn]

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

Comments

Re: Katte Textual Criticism: Discussion (REPLY HERE)

[mildred_of_midgard]

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*

Re: Katte Textual Criticism: Discussion (REPLY HERE)

[selenak]

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?

Re: Katte Textual Criticism: Discussion (REPLY HERE)

[mildred_of_midgard]

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.