Frederick the Great discussion post 9

[cahn]

...I leave you guys alone for one weekend and it's time for a new Fritz post, lol!

I'm gonna reply to the previous post comments but I guess new letter-reading, etc. should go in this one :)

Frederick the Great links

Comments

Re: Legacies

[selenak]

Kleist definitely needed help. He was an (incredibly talented) mess. Also wrote some of the most artistic letters in the German language. Had two one sided hateships going in his life, one with Napoleon and one with Goethe, with the former of course not knowing Kleist existed, and the later basically going "...err, no, young man" about all those manuscripts Kleist kept sending to him.

Kleist's Napoleon thing expressed itself, post-Prussian defeat, by young Kleist making plans to anonymously enlist in the French army to either a) kill Napoleon somehow if he got near him, or b) die in his Service. His older sister Ulrike, who was his common sense life saver most of his life, prevented that. The literature expression of Kleist's Napoleon thing was his play about Arminius, aka "Herrmann the Cheruscan", as he was then called, defeating the Roman Varus. Making analogies between the Romans and the French was a thing during the Napoleon years in general, and that's when good old Arminius was rediscovered from the Tacitus entry on the big Roman defeat and made into a national hero which he remained until the end of WWII, after which he was worse Nazi-tainted than Fritz because you can guess what use the Nazis had made of him. Which is why we don't call the battle in question the "Herrmannsschlacht" anymore in German, we call it "die Varusschlacht", and refer to the guy in question as Arminius, not Herrmann, which is a German given to him around the Renaissance days.

Anyway, back to Kleist: probably bi, had messed up relationships with both bff Wilhelm and with a temporary fiancee, was close to his older (half-)sister Ulrike while also increasingly resenting her (she had financial independence due to the parent they didn't share and used the fact she had money and he did not and was dependent on her support more often than not from doing at least some of the stupid suicidal things he wanted to; she also once rescued him, dressed as a man, from a French arrest during his "I'm gonna enlist in the French army and kill/serve Napoleon" phase), which all culminated that when he was about to committ suicide with a lady he hardly knew - who had cancer, that's how they'd found each other as wanting-to-die-people, he first wrote a goodbye letter to a shared cousin in which he complained Ulrike didn't understand him, and then apologizing wrote to Ulrike in his goodbye letter to her "let me take back those harsh words I wrote to Cousin Marie; you always did everything anyone could to help me and more, but the truth is I could not be helped on this earth".