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We now have a community, rheinsberg, that has quite a lot of the interesting historical content (and more coming regularly), organized nicely with lots of lovely tags so if there's any subject you are interested in it is easy to find :D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: A Katte Related Correspondance, or: No Mercy Like Hohenzollern Mercy

[mildred_of_midgard]

did we ever go over suspects for who on earth leaked Katte's letters to his Father, grandfather and to FW?

No, but here are two points I want to introduce into the discussion.

1) Katte specifically asked Pastor Müller if he could make a clean copy of the letter to his father, and Müller said no, there wasn't time. So Katte asked Schack if he would have a copy made after Katte was gone.

So there was not only incoming and outgoing mail that the Küstrin staff had access to, but there was an actual copy of the letter lying around waiting to be copied! That would have been the easiest letter to leak.

2) The letters to FW and his grandfather were written in captivity in Berlin, so I don't see how they ever could have passed through Küstrin staff hands. I don't know when/where the Fritz letter was written--do you? It reads extremely like a Berlin letter to me (i.e. still hoping for a pardon), but maybe not. Okay, Lavisse doesn't know when it was written, but thinks it might have been that last night in Küstrin. If he doesn't know, probably no one knows.

Okay, so he does give a citation showing where he got the letter from (he summarizes but doesn't quote it): "This sort of testament destined for the prince is inserted in a report of Pastor Müller to the King, Beitrag zur Lebensgeschichte Friedrichs des Grossen, welcher einen merkwürdigen Briefwechsel über den ehemaligen Aufenthalt des gedachten Königs zu Custrin enthält."

I haven't turned up that report (published 1788), but you'd think it would date to before August 1731.

Anyway. It's weird that the letters to FW, the grandfather, and the father all leaked and ended up in the same pamphlet, when they were written in different towns. By the way, can you double check that it's all three of them and only those three in the pamphlet? Wilhelmine mentions a letter to the brother-in-law (i.e., Rochow) along with the letters to his father and grandfather, but none to FW. And if she's working from that pamphlet...

So what I'm getting at is that, unless they were all opened in transit, they must have been leaked when they were in the same place. Which is either the royal archives, or the Katte family home.

Now, mail did get opened a lot back then. And the Katte affair was a big scandal. If you were part of the mail delivery system and got your hands on a letter from the condemned, you might steam open that seal and make a copy too. But if they're all being sent from different places to different places, that seems like a hell of a coincidence.

Eichel seems like a super unlikely candidate to me. Blanning does say (no citation) that he would later disapprove of Finck's cashiering by Fritz for the Maxen fiasco, but it would really surprise me to see him leaking things. Not impossible! But very surprising. He's directly under the King's eye, and it's a huge risk, and keeping documents secret is his job at which he excels. You may be right about "least suspected person ever and getting away with it" for this very reason, and he may be laughing at me from beyond the grave. But I still suspect him least.

The Katte family, as you noted, has other children to lose, and even more significantly to my mind, they seem united in throwing Katte to the wolves rather than risk anyone else. They write letters asking for pardon, but that's not a real risk. That's permissible.

What I'm thinking, and this is wild speculation based on nothing whatsoever, is a shadowy figure, made safer by their very invisibility. Not having the protection of being from a noble family can go either way--you can be disposed of without consequences on the one hand, but on the other, you're not under the royal microscope so much.

So...Katte family servant? Maybe a governess or some loyal retainer who raised Katte as a child? Someone who was angry and rebelling in the only way they could: getting some visibility into this poor guy's fate?

Or possibly, it occurs to me, Katte kept copies, maybe drafts, of all the letters on him when he was taken from Berlin to Küstrin? And they all ended up there, hanging out on the same desk while the clean copy of Hans Heinrich's letter was being made before it was sent?

That actually strikes me as the least unlikely possibility, since before I realized two of the letters were written in Berlin, I always suspected the Küstrin staff, if not Schack himself.

And yes, they just watched Katte's head roll for incurring the King's displeasure. But they're farther away from the King than Eichel, are less under his microscope, and have more plausible deniability. "I left it on my desk to make a clean copy; a servant must have gotten to it." If Eichel tries that excuse, even if FW believes it, he'll have Eichel sacked if not worse in a day, because if three letters got leaked on Eichel's watch, who knows what more sensitive info is going to get leaked, with that kind of security.

And Münchow, Lepel, and/or Schack were sympathetic enough to both Fritz and Katte that they arranged the execution so that Fritz didn't have to watch, while still letting Fritz and Katte have their final exchange, and that was way more risky than leaking the letters, because it had 150 witnesses and couldn't be blamed on the servants. (I suspect the 150 witnesses on the ground weren't aware that Fritz couldn't see it from where he was, and nobody both put 2 and 2 together and talked.)

So I'm still leaning toward Küstrin staff, after considering all the options. Katte family servant would make good fanfic, though. ;) Too bad Fontane didn't think of that, when he was writing the loyal servant bringing Katte's body home for burial.