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We now have a community, rheinsberg, that has quite a lot of the interesting historical content (and more coming regularly), organized nicely with lots of lovely tags so if there's any subject you are interested in it is easy to find :D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

Heinrich correspondence

[mildred_of_midgard]

As expected, it took less than half the time to redo the manual cleanup as it did to do it in the first place. It was still incredibly tedious, and I'm going to take a break before doing any more correspondents, as well as possibly request book bribes for the next set. ;)

I would like to get Ulrike (there's more than I initially reported, because the form of address changes from "queen of Sweden" to "dowager queen of Sweden") and possibly Catherine the Great, especially because of the overlap with Heinrich and the Polish partition. Also because we should just have the two greats. :D

On to the text itself. It's definitely lower quality than the ones where I didn't have to OCR before translating. I did what I could in terms of cleanup, but it's about a thousand pages, and no way did I check everything. It's still better than what we had, which was hundreds of pages of French.

I had to delete the footnotes, which were mostly in German, and I tried to catch all the references to the footnotes in the text, but if you see a stray number 3 or whatever that doesn't make sense, it's probably a footnote I missed. If something doesn't make sense and you want to see if there's a footnote, or if the text got OCRed wrong, I tried to include the urls for each letter, so you can inspect the original page.

However, because of letters that run to multiple pages, and also overlap of different letters on the same page, and also the inevitable bugs, there are probably missing urls. Fortunately, the urls have a predictable format: http://friedrich.uni-trier.de/de/politKorr/21/265/image, where 21 is the volume number and 265 the page number, so you can manually navigate at will.

Numbers in general the OCR struggled with, so if you see that Fritz had 'go' of something, he might have had 90 of them.

The division into paragraphs may also not exactly match the original.

If you see any truncated, missing, or otherwise buggy letters (like the French is in the translation section), please don't hesitate to draw this to my attention! No bribes required for fixing bugs. :D

Finally, another random thing that cropped up in my reading: Seydlitz dies, and guess what? It's his fault for not listening to his doctors! According to the man who notoriously never listened to a doctor and always said he regretted it when he did. But only der einzige is allowed to know better than the doctors, I suppose.

At least he's writing this to Heinrich and not Seydlitz's widow, although god knows he probably wrote that to her too. :P She was just his NURSE anyway.

Okay, uploading, and off to catch up on the rest of this glorious fast-paced fandom! :D

Re: Heinrich correspondence

[selenak]

You are awesome, royal librarian, and in the true rokoko spirit, I lay myself at your feet.

Finally, another random thing that cropped up in my reading: Seydlitz dies, and guess what? It's his fault for not listening to his doctors! According to the man who notoriously never listened to a doctor and always said he regretted it when he did. But only der einzige is allowed to know better than the doctors, I suppose.

Well, naturally! Seydlitz of course also made it on the obelisk. Writes Heinrich:

General von Seydlitz distinguished himself from his youth. He was present in all campaigns of the Seven Years' War, and always with honor and glory. Through dexterity, fearlessness, combined with speed and presence of mind, all his war deeds became pernicious to the enemy. Lowositz, Kollin, Roßbach, Hochkirch, Zorndorf, Kunersdorf and Freiberg are his monuments to victory. He was often dangerously wounded. The Prussian cavalry owes to him the degree of perfection which the stranger admires. This rare man, surviving all dangers, died in the arms of peace.

Re: Heinrich correspondence

[cahn]

Oh wow, thank you for doing this!

Looking very briefly at pt 1: 9567 and 10147 look like they got cut off?

Re: Heinrich correspondence

[mildred_of_midgard]

Fixed! Thanks for catching that.

And wow, those weren't just any two missing letters, either! One was the announcement of Leuthen, Fritz's most admired victory, and the other was one of the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad condolence letters on AW's death. "You can't expect things to be *perfect* in this imperrfect world, you know; it's not like we expected him to be *immortal*, after all. But please tell me how Wilhelmine is doing because she's actually important."

You're right. If Heinrich had been in the room with Fritz, Fritz would have been strangled on the spot.

Re: Heinrich correspondence

[cahn]

ahahaha I, uh, may have been looking for those letters :P

Re: Heinrich correspondence

[mildred_of_midgard]

Aha! Of course you were. I ought to have guessed. :P