Thank you for looking at the reports! We have narrowed in on our whistleblowers. :D
Would you say there's a decent chance Katte's last letter to his father, written at Küstrin and passed on to Müller to be passed on to Schack to make a clean copy, ended up in the archives at Berlin? And do you think there's a chance foreign envoys would have access to less sensitive material, like personal farewell letters, from the archives? I just want to shave our story with Occam's Razor as much as possible.
Also, I seem to remember you saying the letters were circulating in Berlin as early as November 1730, but can't find the comment where you said that. Do you remember what your source was?
Which is really weird, the more I think about it.
Weird, but maybe not that weird. When I see biographers talking about how other memoirists are unreliable, they're usually not evaluating the evidence, they're just citing a long history of other biographers agreeing that memoirist X is unreliable. And the other memoirists I can think of have a long history of being considered unreliable since well before 1884, and usually for reasons that involve some kind of personal agenda. But if everybody sees everybody citing Catt without comment, most everybody's going to keep doing it.
As to reading the preface...there are different editions out there, some in English and some in German and some in French, some with just the memoirs, some with the diary, and possibly at least one with just the diary. We happen to have uncovered an edition with a German preface to French memoirs + diaries that lays out the evidence for distrusting the memoirs, because we were limited to what I could find that was freely available in digitized form, but we could easily have gotten the diary and memoirs and missed that preface. And a lot of people, I think, just read the memoirs and don't even bother with the diary, and as we've seen, memoir intros don't say anything about unreliability.
I would be curious if you dug up a library copy of the 1965 German translation of the diary I mentioned (when real life permits! which I realize is not this month), and we could see what the introductory material on *that* says.
Re: Katte! - Envoy reports
Would you say there's a decent chance Katte's last letter to his father, written at Küstrin and passed on to Müller to be passed on to Schack to make a clean copy, ended up in the archives at Berlin? And do you think there's a chance foreign envoys would have access to less sensitive material, like personal farewell letters, from the archives? I just want to shave our story with Occam's Razor as much as possible.
Also, I seem to remember you saying the letters were circulating in Berlin as early as November 1730, but can't find the comment where you said that. Do you remember what your source was?
Which is really weird, the more I think about it.
Weird, but maybe not that weird. When I see biographers talking about how other memoirists are unreliable, they're usually not evaluating the evidence, they're just citing a long history of other biographers agreeing that memoirist X is unreliable. And the other memoirists I can think of have a long history of being considered unreliable since well before 1884, and usually for reasons that involve some kind of personal agenda. But if everybody sees everybody citing Catt without comment, most everybody's going to keep doing it.
As to reading the preface...there are different editions out there, some in English and some in German and some in French, some with just the memoirs, some with the diary, and possibly at least one with just the diary. We happen to have uncovered an edition with a German preface to French memoirs + diaries that lays out the evidence for distrusting the memoirs, because we were limited to what I could find that was freely available in digitized form, but we could easily have gotten the diary and memoirs and missed that preface. And a lot of people, I think, just read the memoirs and don't even bother with the diary, and as we've seen, memoir intros don't say anything about unreliability.
I would be curious if you dug up a library copy of the 1965 German translation of the diary I mentioned (when real life permits! which I realize is not this month), and we could see what the introductory material on *that* says.