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We now have a community, rheinsberg, that has quite a lot of the interesting historical content (and more coming regularly), organized nicely with lots of lovely tags so if there's any subject you are interested in it is easy to find :D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

[mildred_of_midgard]

Ooh, wait, what's this? It's just after the defeat at Maxen, Fritz is depressed, he's telling Catt in direct discourse about being locked up alone by his father in a room for three months, his food passed through a small window, getting his shirt the same way, being miserable, never being happy except at Rheinsberg.

It's not Katte, but it's close! I'm stiiiill skeptical about the Katte passage not being lifted from Voltaire (he definitely fudged the date, because Maxen is late 1759, not early 1758), but we'll see how the last 25 pages go.

Re: Henri de Catt

[selenak]

Do tell! These pre Katte's death imprisonment conditions, btw, are all mentioned by Seckendorff in his dispatches to Vienna.

Re: Henri de Catt

[mildred_of_midgard]

Neat! We even have the letters where FW gave very detailed instructions on Fritz's imprisonment. Check out YouthDocuments, pages 44 ff. for the instructions on getting him to Küstrin without being captured, the terms of imprisonment, then the interrogation protocol, then another letter on not letting him escape from Küstrin. There's also one letter in there to Wilhelmine during the Küstrin period, which I don't think is in Trier.

Nothing in the last 25 pages of Catt that I could see that convinces me Fritz talked about Katte, but the diary's up, so now you can check yourself. I only read parts of the French and skimmed quite a bit, and I haven't had time to read through the entire translation, so I'm sure there are at least some goodies I'm missing, even if not Katte ones. (I didn't see "If they had raised me instead of humiliating me" or "I have to be won over with praise," both of which could be Fritz talking or Catt putting his opinions in Fritz's mouth. Agree with you that the impersonal sounds more like Fritz, though.)

Oh, btw, speaking of Fritz's imprisonment conditions, I was starting to think I had hallucinated (or read in fanfic) the line where Fritz said he preferred starving at Küstrin to starving at Wusterhausen (which is corroboration of Wilhelmine's accounts of going hungry), but Lavisse had it: Fritz to Grumbkow, as reported by Sauveterre, French ambassador to Prussia (French Rottenburg's replacement, I think).

More evidence, if that's reliable (and god knows it sounds like him), that Fritz was taunting his captors because he didn't think anything worse than imprisonment was in the cards.

So I still think offering his life for Katte's in August was less of a literal offer than a bargaining ploy. "You'll have to kill me, and I don't think you're going to kill me, so you'll give me what I want if I just don't back down, right? I'm really good at not backing down." Only when he gets the news about Katte's imminent execution does he seem to panic and realize he's in over his head. And then he starts offering his life, his rights to the succession, whatever it takes.

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