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We now have a community, rheinsberg, that has quite a lot of the interesting historical content (and more coming regularly), organized nicely with lots of lovely tags so if there's any subject you are interested in it is easy to find :D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

[cahn]

than to say than that it is better for a culprit to die according to justice, than for world or the kingdom to fall into ruin.

Maaaaan, he's really convinced himself of that line, hasn't he. *shivers*

Re: A Katte Related Correspondance, or: No Mercy Like Hohenzollern Mercy

[selenak]

Indeed he has. And a great many historians with him, given a lot still agree that Katte's death was justified by the laws of the time.

(And pre WWII that it was the "saving" of Frederick the Great. Along with the imprisonment and reform treatment.)

(Fontane, who does think FW acted according to the law but has ambiguous feelings about Prussia itself - "beloved and hated Prussia", as he calls it, meaning beloved and hated by himself, not the population at large - puts it a bit differently, that Prussia has two founding Dates, the Great Elector's battle victory (that forms the basis of Kleist's play "Prinz Friedrich von Homburg" which I told you about) and the day Katte was executed, the more crucial date being Katte's death. By which he doesn't mean the usual 19th century "Küstrin made Frederick Great" thing, but that this execution was instrumental for the type of ethics, not just military ethics, which Prussia subsequently had. The kind of pseudo-Roman ruthless subjugation of the individual to "the state". Which, yes. Prussia as Prussia in the sense of what it became had as Krockow and not just him pointed out two true founding fathers, FW and Fritz, and depended on one following the other, and formed by the other.

Again: Young Theo, much as he loved his historical anecdotes, also wrote an article titled "Why Prussia has to go" in 1848.