Announcing Rheinsberg: Frederick the Great discussion post 10

[cahn]

So for anyone who is reading this and would like to learn more about Frederick the Great and his contemporaries, but who doesn't want to wade through 500k (600k?) words worth of comments and an increasingly sprawling comment section:

We now have a community, rheinsberg, that has quite a lot of the interesting historical content (and more coming regularly), organized nicely with lots of lovely tags so if there's any subject you are interested in it is easy to find :D

Comments

Re: Collected answers from the last post

[mildred_of_midgard]

describing him as without morals

According to at least one source (I want to say Voltaire, but perhaps also someone more reliable, I forget), Fritz used to tease him by offering him money if he would change his religion for the 5th time. I also have a memory of a Fritz quote that Pöllnitz was a good dinner companion but should be locked up afterwards, but again I don't remember the source. Could be from Hamilton's Rheinsberg volume.

Anyway. I'm not getting a strong sense of morals here, is what I'm saying.

Which is why I was thinking in terms of self-preservation, not morals (remember when we weren't sure if Catt maybe didn't write down the bit about Fritz telling him about Katte in the diary because it was that touchy a topic?). But yeah, chatty guy is chatty and I can believe he would have spilled the beans. What makes me think he didn't, to Catt anyway, is that his account and Catt's differ so widely. Fritz thinking he was about to die is almost the only thing they have in common that might not have been public knowledge/rumor.

Whereas Pöllnitz and Wilhelmine seem to have agreed on their stories before writing their respective memoirs, and it's really obvious they are among each other's sources.

Re: Collected answers from the last post

[selenak]

I also have a memory of a Fritz quote that Pöllnitz was a good dinner companion but should be locked up afterwards, but again I don't remember the source. Could be from Hamilton's Rheinsberg volume.

Hamilton does use it; it's also in Pöllnitz' German wiki entry, and I have a vague and hence not ultimately reliable memory the original source was another letter from Crown Prince Fritz to Grumbkow. In any event, Pöllnitz never did get locked up after dinner and kept hanging out with the royals till the end.

(Btw, German wiki entry on Pöllnitz always cracks me up by observing that as a young man in Versailles, he met Liselotte (of the Palatinate and d'Orleans, widow of Philippe the standard setter for gay royalty) in her old age, and they emerged from this meeting with identical impressions - "entertaining, but talks too much".