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rheinsberg, that has quite a lot of the interesting historical content (and more coming regularly), organized nicely with lots of lovely tags so if there's any subject you are interested in it is easy to find :D

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From:

mildred_of_midgard

If Grumbkow had been in Küstrin before or during Katte's execution, people would have noticed and remembered.

Agree, but that doesn't mean your or I would remember it off the tops of our heads. There's certainly no guarantee I would.

However: as I recall Der Thronfolger gave FW and Fritz two confrontations post flight attempt and pre Fritz being sent to Küstrin, one where FW doesn't know yet Katte was involved, the other when where he did and it makes him additionally furious. All my Fritz bios are back at the library, so you tell me - isn't it true that they met more than once pre Küstrin?

Yes, that sounds correct to me: one before (August 5/6, immediately after the failed escape attempt, near Mannheim) and one after Keith's desertion was discovered (August 11 in Wesel). But according to the dates I have, FW hadn't even ordered Katte arrested at that point (August 16th), much less had him arrested (August 27th), so I don't think Fritz would be offering up his life yet. Unless Kloosterhuis gives different dates?

Because if the script didn't entirely make up the fact FW already knew about Katte's involvement during the second confrontation and brought that up to Fritz, there's a tiny room for Fritz to have offered his life for Katte's.

Agree, but my unreliable modern sources all agree that Fritz implicated Katte during his first questioning. (You can check the Youth Documents in the library, but I didn't see Katte's name in skimming the interrogation.) It's possible that later he realized that was a mistake, and that Katte's life was in danger, but I don't see any occasions on which he and FW met in person after the 11th, or at least it's not in my highly unreliable secondary sources. So any offer from Fritz to FW after Katte was implicated would have to have been in a letter that we don't know about.

it also sounds more like Fritz full of bravado but certain nothing worse than prison will happen to either of them, not like Fritz aware Katte could and would die for this and ready to offer his life.

All of my secondary sources match this, and some even comment on it: Fritz's communications from before November 6 are full of bravado and a conviction that nothing worse than imprisonment will happen. That's why I would be so surprised if he was offering his life at that stage. Katte hadn't even been condemned yet, though he was in prison.

I also just have a hard time seeing Fritz with his very strong survival instincts and sense of self-interest offering his life in a non-emergency situation where nobody's actually been condemned yet.

possibly due to Fritz having gotten his hand on the entire Katte file and burned some items, as per Catt

I thought of that, but I immediately dismissed it, thinking, that's the one letter he would keep! The one that shows him in a really good light. Unless he said other things in that letter that he's now ashamed of...

But that would assume that Fritz knew about the sentence, when all the descriptions have him unaware Katte would die until the very morning it happened.

Yes, that's what this letter made me suddenly question, especially now that I have no reason to believe Catt's description comes from Fritz. Two of those sources (W and T) have Katte arriving the morning of the 6th and going straight from the coach to the (non-existent) scaffold, so I don't trust them on timing at all. P actually gets that part right (Katte spent the night in prayers), which is interesting.

At any rate, if Fritz actually found out when Katte arrived at Küstrin, i.e. on the afternoon of the 5th, and not when he walked past his window on the morning of the 6th, that would give time for "a thousand times" and a letter, and I wouldn't trust W/P/T/C/V to get it right, or the firsthand Katte-POV accounts to report it.

I think some of the other people, Münchow, Pastor Müller, whose testimonies we have independent from Fritz, would have mentioned it.

Also thought of that, but Münchow Jr's age could be measured in the single digits, we don't have the testimony of Münchow Sr., who was in the room with Fritz, and both Major Schack and Besser, whom Fontane reports, are telling a very Katte-centric story that follows him and report nothing about what went on inside Fritz's room that couldn't be seen by Katte (the kiss throwing, the last words--which we still don't know where Fontane got those from). None of them report any fainting or offers for Katte's life, which our other sources do. And Münchow Jr. doesn't even know about the order FW gave to make Fritz watch and outright denies it, so I seriously doubt he knows about any letters Fritz might have written.

Would that we had Münchow Sr.'s testimony, because he actually interacted the most with Fritz. I know Fontane was interested in Katte's tragedy, but I want to know more about where Fontane got his sources, whether they're still extant, and if there are or were other letters we don't already know about, that would tell us more about Fritz's POV. Because, yes, Fontane, we all focus excessively on his perspective, blah blah, I don't disagree, but we do so without a single reliable account! There's reason to revisit this!

(I also still am deeply curious who leaked Katte's last letters for that pamphlet Wilhelmine was drawing on, but I guess we'll never know.)

Not least because of the phrasing "I have never denied Katte". (Like Peter denied Jesus, son of Calvinist FW and thus schooled in the bible?)

Yes, this is very true. It does sound biblical. I had been wondering, though, if maybe he meant *after* Katte's death, i.e. when Katte was a criminal who had been beheaded for desertion, and you seem to be getting at the same thing just below.

Perhaps FW offered him the out of blaming Katte wholesale for the desertion, the flight plan, everything, early on, and Fritz didn't.

Now THAT'S interesting. Maybe that's what FW wanted to hear, and when Fritz insisted that no, *he* wanted to run away because he hated life under FW so much, that's when FW lost it and decided his son needed to be broken.

It seems unlikely? If only because FW seems to have assumed the worst of Fritz at all times. But then again, we do have that quote from a few years earlier (I think) about other people filling young Fritz's head with ideas that led him to oppose FW. So maybe.

I know FW asked him about who seduced whom later, post Katte's death, and that would be what "I have never denied him" relates to, and it's all mixed up in Fritz' mind.

Yes, I was thinking that Fritz might have meant that he stood by Katte after his death, and you're right that this would be the perfect example. He might have had the "I seduced/corrupted Katte" in mind, and it makes perfect sense to combine that with offering his life.

Memory is also not highly reliable around trauma anyway. It's probably asking too much to get a just-the-facts account out of Fritz on this topic.

It's also worth mentioning that if my sources are correct that Fritz implicated Katte (and others, but none of them died) during his initial questioning, then even if he doesn't know about the misaddressed letter going through the cousin, he's got to be carrying the guilt for that as well, and thus can be expected to insist even harder that he never ever betrayed Katte, no, and always stood by him.

So I like your idea that he's thinking that the way he refused to put the blame on anyone else as the prime mover of the plan (Katte wouldn't even need to have been named specifically, nor would it necessarily have had to have been an explicit bargain, just an option that Fritz refused to take when being asked whose idea it was), both before and after Katte's death, plus the way he offered his life on November 6, together count as "I offered my life for his a thousand times." It's actually quite plausible that Fritz would interpret "refused to blame him for my idea" as "offered my life," which is not all that far from the truth, either.

The September 16 interrogation of Fritz starts on page 50 of the youth documents, if you want to check it out, but this volume doesn't seem to have the earlier interrogations, the one where Fritz supposedly implicated all his accomplices. Those documents may be in Hinrichs' Der Kronprinzenprozess, but I don't have access to an online copy of that. (I'm also not sure if it's any more reliable than Der Katte-Prozess, which you read and reported as a dud.)