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We now have a community, rheinsberg, that has quite a lot of the interesting historical content (and more coming regularly), organized nicely with lots of lovely tags so if there's any subject you are interested in it is easy to find :D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

[selenak]

Childhood friend? Is that true, or is he confusing Henrys again?

Hamilton makes that claim, too, and since his main source for everything is Carlysle, I assume they both got from good old Thomas C., but Ziebura, who is very into the Heinrich & Catherine relationship, reports nothing but Heinrich dancing with her on the same occasion when Fritz sat next to her at dinner. (Evidently he'd brought younger brother along.) They were three years apart (Heinrich was older), and her father was a Prussian general, so it's not impossible, but it would surprise me, given how FW had his kids raised divided by gender.

However, it did occur to me we can simply check her memoirs, which as far as I know are online. If there was more than dancing together on one social evening, I guess she'd have mentioned it, especially since they later on did become friends (as much as politicians can be) as adults. Heinrich's letter to Ferdinand after her death about mourning for as quoted by Ziebura does not mention a childhood Connection:

I am wearing (mourning) in memory of the friendship she's shown towards me, and of her genius. For losing it is a loss to the whole world. (...) She had supreme qualities. I can never forget her attention, her amiability and the power of her mind. What remains now is very small, compared to her. Of course, from a political point of view her death is a stroke of luck for us.

Given the Fritz letter where he complains about not having had the chance to Fritzplain all to Heinrich before Heinrich got invited to Russia, I also doubt the "he send him due to childhood friendship" tale.

How to make German into a literate language: ...yeah. And this is why none of the German writers took him serious on literary matters.

Incidentally, Franconian dialect is a bit like that - lots of "La" added, as in "a wengala" for "ein wenig" (a bit), "Brödla" for "Brötchen" (Bread), "Ach Gottla!" for "Ach Gott!" (oh God), and so forth. Wilhelmine might have told him, since that's what they speak in Bayreuth, but then again, Wilhelmine like the rest of the sibs probably spoke as little German as she could get away with.