I don't know, I feel like a lot of people stop at reading the memoirs, and they take them as trustworthy because everyone else does. I think the information was not so much lost as never that widely known, even in 1884.
And also also... you've found cases in the memoirs that just don't make any sense, right? Although I guess by themselves they might not ping someone whose priors were that the memoirs were reliable.
Yes, but I took them largely at face value, or at least as reliable as any highly biased biography, until selenak came along with that preface making it clear we had a historical novel here.
I thought there were some oddities about the Katte account, like that non sequitur, but I found a way to explain it away before questioning my source. Or at least the thought that he might have omitted a sensitive part of the conversation occurred to me when "He might have TOTALLY MADE SHIT UP" did not.
ALSO. There's a big difference between "in the memoirs and not in the diary" and "in the memoirs and also in this other 18th century pamphlet/book/source" or "in the memoirs and not in the diary and happens to be the name of Catt's brother-in-law," which requires very obscure knowledge that's external to Catt.
So, no, if I was writing a biography and reading the memoirs and diary with no preface, I think not seeing the Katte episode in the diary, or even picking up on the fact that he stitched different conversations together, would probably not have pinged my radar as "This guy makes stuff up." I would have assumed he was reordering actual conversations as he remembered them (with human memory being faulty) to make a more interesting narrative to the reader, so that related topics like "my abusive childhood" were all in one conversation, before I assumed that he was taking other people's words and putting them in Fritz's mouth. Even that one segue just parses as "rough draft/missing paragraph" before it parses as "total intellectual dishonesty."
It's unfortunate Catt's still considered trustworthy, but in my opinion, it's not terribly surprising. Not when I still see 2016 biographers saying that Katte's execution was directly below Fritz's window (and the counterevidence for that is muuuch more widely distributed throughout biographies than the counterevidence for trusting Catt).
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Re: Catt's reliability
Date: 2020-02-18 04:56 am (UTC)And also also... you've found cases in the memoirs that just don't make any sense, right? Although I guess by themselves they might not ping someone whose priors were that the memoirs were reliable.
Yes, but I took them largely at face value, or at least as reliable as any highly biased biography, until
I thought there were some oddities about the Katte account, like that non sequitur, but I found a way to explain it away before questioning my source. Or at least the thought that he might have omitted a sensitive part of the conversation occurred to me when "He might have TOTALLY MADE SHIT UP" did not.
ALSO. There's a big difference between "in the memoirs and not in the diary" and "in the memoirs and also in this other 18th century pamphlet/book/source" or "in the memoirs and not in the diary and happens to be the name of Catt's brother-in-law," which requires very obscure knowledge that's external to Catt.
So, no, if I was writing a biography and reading the memoirs and diary with no preface, I think not seeing the Katte episode in the diary, or even picking up on the fact that he stitched different conversations together, would probably not have pinged my radar as "This guy makes stuff up." I would have assumed he was reordering actual conversations as he remembered them (with human memory being faulty) to make a more interesting narrative to the reader, so that related topics like "my abusive childhood" were all in one conversation, before I assumed that he was taking other people's words and putting them in Fritz's mouth. Even that one segue just parses as "rough draft/missing paragraph" before it parses as "total intellectual dishonesty."
It's unfortunate Catt's still considered trustworthy, but in my opinion, it's not terribly surprising. Not when I still see 2016 biographers saying that Katte's execution was directly below Fritz's window (and the counterevidence for that is muuuch more widely distributed throughout biographies than the counterevidence for trusting Catt).