Danish envoy report uncovered! Because Koser is bad at opinions but good at facts, and he cited his source.
His source is a German translation, of course, sigh. Good news, though: it's not just one report, it's all the reports pertaining to the escape, from August through December! I can't tell if they're all Danish or if they're a collection of reports (I can't even tell where it says the Nov 11 one is Danish or from Johnn), but I have uploaded NeuesBerlinischeMonatsschrift9, and the relevant pages are 324-349. Whenever you have time. (German sources are both good and bad, in that one person can read them really well and at great length, but two people not at all or only a little bit, and French sources we can all read a little bit, but nobody very well or at great length. I still prefer to have at least access to the original whenever possible, whichever language that might be.)
Anyway, I spotted Katte's arrest, and it matches Wilhelmine's description that he was just about to mount the horse when he was arrested. She's not making that up for sensationalist purposes; she's reporting what she heard. Which is probably sensationalist, but could also be true. I'd think it would have come up in the trial documents, though?
Like Wilhelmine, the envoy report also has Keith being warned in Wesel that the plot was betrayed, and fleeing only when he was warned. That really was the account that went around in the 18th century, and as far as I can tell, the only one that was transmitted orally. Wilhelmine has it, Fritz has it, Peter's son has it...the only source I've seen with my own eyes that has him leaving before that is Seckendorff, who says that when FW arrived in Geldern, which was evidently on the 12th, he learned that Keith had left Wesel "several days" before. Since Seckendorff was with FW at the time, the event was fresh news and practically local, and it was the official report to the King, I trust it more than I trust the accounts of people in Berlin who are playing games of telephone on the 19th. Plus there seems to be some source I have't seen that specifies he disappeared on the 6th. Probably in Kloosterhuis.
Oh, wow, yes, Kloosterhuis has Keith's quarters being inspected on the 7th, but he has also two unrelated things I didn't notice. One, it's Rottembourg's wife who calls Katte "charmant mais étourdi," which means all my sources saying Rottembourg was never married are wrong (I was thinking they might be, but wasn't sure). Two, Kloosterhuis just cites Fritz's judgment of Keith and Katte as "aimable, mais aussi étourdis que moi" in Catt like you can totally trust that conversation in Catt to be real. Wow, people really haven't gotten the memo about Catt.
[ETA: No! I was wrong. I was thinking Eva Sophie looked like a very German name for French envoy Count Rottembourg's wife, and then I got suspicious we had the wrong one. It's not impossible he married a German woman, but I thought it might be more likely to be Prussian Count Rothenburg's wife. So I looked it up, and Wikipedia tells me that Prussian Count Rothenburg married an Eva Sophie, plus the name I have for the maybe-wife of French Count Rothenburg/Rottembourg is Jeanne-Madelene. So correction to your Kloosterhuis write-up: Katte is friends with French envoy Count Rothenburg/Rottembourg, but it's Fritz's friend Prussian Count Rothenburg whose wife writes to Katte's stepmom that he's "charmant mais étourdi." Rothenburgs, seriously, could you be any more confusing? Also, we still don't know whether the French envoy was married or not. I think I'm going with no for my fic, but I'd still like to know.]
Going back to the embassy report after that digression, yes, Katte blows Fritz a kiss with his hand, not a hand-foot. And the official report gets the time right: between 7 and 8 am, and obviously the date. It also says Fritz was informed at 5 am. Two hours of offering his crown and his life a thousand times, ouch.
Oh, man, Katte blew Fritz a final kiss thinking he could see it, and Fritz never knew. Oh, right, he opened the archives. Okay, he didn't know for ten years. Unless someone told him, I guess.
Wow, if the FW order in the archive said he was supposed to watch, and the reports based on eyewitnesses said he did watch, no wonder he spent the rest of his life thinking that only fainting just in time had spared him.
I keep going back and forth on whether Münchow could be wrong--he was only 7!--but I keep concluding probably not. I'm not 100% sure, but the balance of evidence seems to come down in his favor on this point.
I suppose it's possible that Katte knows perfectly well that Fritz can't see him, but it's all he's got of Fritz, so he's staring in that direction, knowing Fritz is inside the building that he can glimpse a corner of, and blowing a kiss because he wants to, and maybe in hopes someone will tell Fritz. Or there's a window in sight, and Katte really thinks Fritz is in it.
Lol at Kloosterhuis saying the age-old controversy on whether Fritz could watch is "obsolet." What do you mean, obsolete? It's extremely important! It's the only thing I've thought about all week!
Anyway, 25 pages of new reports in the library, and no rush, royal reader. :D
Oh, man, Katte blew Fritz a final kiss thinking he could see it, and Fritz never knew. Oh, right, he opened the archives. Okay, he didn't know for ten years. Unless someone told him, I guess.
:(
I keep going back and forth on whether Münchow could be wrong--he was only 7!--but I keep concluding probably not. I'm not 100% sure, but the balance of evidence seems to come down in his favor on this point.
...yeah, I think you've marshalled the evidence pretty convincingly in his direction. And also he would know the building.
I suppose it's possible that Katte knows perfectly well that Fritz can't see him, but it's all he's got of Fritz, so he's staring in that direction, knowing Fritz is inside the building that he can glimpse a corner of, and blowing a kiss because he wants to, and maybe in hopes someone will tell Fritz. Or there's a window in sight, and Katte really thinks Fritz is in it.
Poor Katte :( At least Fritz did find out, eventually :(
Poor Katte :( At least Fritz did find out, eventually :(
Yeah. I guess the best of ... FW's possible worlds is where they get to say goodbye, Fritz doesn't have to watch the sword fall, Katte gets the comfort of thinking he's looking at Fritz, and Fritz finds out about the kiss later, so...at least they (probably) got that?
Had a quick look at the reports. Definitely the same language and phrasing as the pamphlet, so, they either were written by the same person or draw on the same source.
The reports in general are reasonably good in terms of what they claim, but far from error free. The last but one report is sure Fritz has renounced his right to the succession post Katte's execution, for example, and the report writer says that while this isn't yet generally known, he himself has seen the conditions, and quotes from them. (They incliude the promise never to claim the crown of Prussia at a later point, either.)
Now, obviously this did not happen, and in fact the whole reeducation program was in a way a confirmation that FW had decided to keep Fritz as Crown Prince after all. But I think it's possible someone leaked the October FW demand for Fritz to renounce his place in the sucession to the envoy, and Fritz' survival as opposed to Katte's execution was first interpreted as a sign he'd given in.
Also: the writer earlier says for all that FW is pissed off at the Brits, in actual fact he owes them because he, the writer, happens to know they tried to discourage, not encourage Fritz.
Wow, people really haven't gotten the memo about Catt.
Which is really weird, the more I think about it. I mean, the preface to the 1884 edition of his diary really lays it out in point by point detail. This is not news, even though it was to us. And yet, no one ever doubts Catt. (As opposed to most of the other memoirists.) I can only conclude that even the biographers who did go to the trouble of reading the diary as well as the memoirs skipped the preface...
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.
but we could easily have gotten the diary and memoirs and missed that preface.
Well, that's true, but it's interesting that Catt's memoirs' unreliability does seem to be known in 1884 but somehow the knowledge seems to have gotten lost since then. Like, you'd expect that people would pass down that history as well, you know?
And also I feel like you and selenak are savvy enough in the way of sources (in your case, you should read that at least partially as "obsessed with What Exactly Happened with Katte's Death, And Who Knew What When?" :) ) that you would have seen it even in the absence of such preface. So why isn't everyone who reads the diary flipping out? maybe they're just not quite as obsessed with Katte
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.
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).
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.
You're probably right. Even among biographers aiming at making themselves stand out from all the previous biographies, "everyone else thinks that" is amazingly powerful. I mean, I didn't see either Jürgen Luh or Klosterhuis mentioning good old Henri de Catt might be less than reliable, either, and they both in different ways pitch themselves as "deconstructing legends".
Also: just think of the (in)famous "If they don't have bread, let them eat cake". Even within Marie Antoinette's lifetime, it was pointed out that this quote first started showing up years before she was born in an essay by Rousseau attributing it to "a princess". Various ladies got associated with it until MA got stuck with it, and ever since, biographers repeat she never said it. And still, pop culture has been so persuasive through the centuries that I dare say if you quiz ten non-historians and non-particularly-immersed-into-the-French-Revolution people, at least eight out of ten would spontanously name that quote, if they name anything, as something she said. One an idea, quote, cliché is there, people don't want to give it up. And Catt is the origin of many a treasured quote, scene, statement.
*nod* The power of memes (used here in the Dawkins sense, not the internet sense).
I mean, I didn't see either Jürgen Luh or Klosterhuis mentioning good old Henri de Catt might be less than reliable, either
So what's interesting is I was searching the Kloosterhuis file for "Catt" just to make sure I wasn't missing anything, and no, I don't see where he does (unless it's just German fail on my part), but he does use the 1884 edition. Which means he either skipped the preface, or he knows perfectly well that Catt's not reliable and just doesn't feel the need to point that out to readers. The former seems unlikely, but the latter is definitely dropping the ball, especially with everyone out there just taking Catt at face value!
It's possible he's also come to the conclusion that the Katte anecdote is most likely real, and discussing Catt's unreliability in general is outside the scope of this work. That's a very charitable interpretation, especially since I personally would put a caveat around trusting Catt on Katte in a work on Katte, but maybe our priorities differ.
Also, I notice that the editor of the Catt diary + memoirs combo is none other than Reinhold Koser. Which I didn't know who that was when I first uploaded the file and you summarized the preface for us, but I do now, and that makes perfect sense. If there's one person I would trust to be so on top of 18th century sources that Catt's plagiarisms would jump out at him, it would be Koser. He has incredible attention to detail (terrible opinions, of course), and I said recently that I wish he had cited his sources for every half line in his volume on Fritz as Crown Prince, then I'd be in heaven. The reason Lavisse is even as good as he is is that he's drawing so heavily on Koser (and thank goodness Lavisse was translated into English for me).
Now I also wish Koser had felt the need to comment on the Katte conversation along with the military education in Catt. Gossipy sensationalist priorities, like you said. ;)
And Catt is the origin of many a treasured quote, scene, statement.
I know, I had built *so much* superstructure in terms of Fritz's character on Catt's work, and I'm having such a hard time letting it go. Both individual elements and my general sense of kind of knowing who Fritz was. If I were even slightly less rigorous (and most biographers are), I'd be going "LALALALALAAAA" at Catt's unreliability.
Reinhold Koser! Yes, that does make sense, and for all my griping about his attitudes, he's superb in what he does. Spotting Catt was ripping off the military analysis from a 1780s publication which I bet even in the 1880s most historians weren't that familiar anymore being but one case in point.
Now I also wish Koser had felt the need to comment on the Katte conversation along with the military education in Catt. Gossipy sensationalist priorities, like you said. ;)
Also, don't Forget, Katte is "der schwache Mann", the weak man who lets Fritz talk him into things against his better judgment. (Something that's not in Koser is all the stuff Kloosterhuis unearthed about young Hans Herrmann's escapedes and toying with the idea to stay in England before his intimacy with the Crown Prince. I do suspect that has something to do with GB as an alternate destination to Paris for Fritz the Francophile.
Speaking of Kloosterhuis, him not putting a question mark on Catt if he's using the 1884 edition is odd, but it might really be because it's not his focus, and whether or not Fritz reallly talked to Catt about Katte isn't relevant to his central narrative.
I know, I had built *so much* superstructure in terms of Fritz's character on Catt's work, and I'm having such a hard time letting it go.
Well, the diary does confirm some pretty important stuff, and there's still the possibility Catt was drawing on a later post Silesian War conversation with Fritz for others. Curse his vanity for not saying so, if that's the case, of course. I must say that I am less inclined to buy young Henri de Catt as a naive innocent in fanfiction, which is probably unfair of me since it was much older Catt who put together the memoirs, the man who'd gone through a lot, including loss of wife and ignominous dismissal after a life time of service. Not to mention impending blindness. It's entirely possible his younger self was really a human Bambi.
for all my griping about his attitudes, he's superb in what he does.
Like I said: good at facts, bad at opinions. :D
Also, I like how we're getting to know our historians. "Catt preface writer" is now "Koser" to us, with all that entails.
Spotting Catt was ripping off the military analysis from a 1780s publication which I bet even in the 1880s most historians weren't that familiar anymore being but one case in point.
Indeed, and reminder for cahn, he's the one who spotted the 1731 Katte execution pamphlet being almost verbatim the same as the Danish ambassador's report. If anyone is der einzige detective, it's Koser!
(I will take credit for tracking down the identities of the Danish ambassador with the name that has 5 widely variant spellings, none of which comes up in the Google search results for any of the others, and the Danish ambassador with the name "John". Because while Koser must have known all this, he didn't give me anything to go on besides the word "John", so some credit to me. :P)
Something that's not in Koser is all the stuff Kloosterhuis unearthed
Right, that was from the Katte letters, which Koser presumably didn't have access to, since they were...where, at Wust until 1945? As opposed to in the state archives?
Speaking of Kloosterhuis, him not putting a question mark on Catt if he's using the 1884 edition is odd, but it might really be because it's not his focus,
Yeah, I guess so, since it's just one passing comment about how Fritz referred to Katte as étourdi.
Well, the diary does confirm some pretty important stuff, and there's still the possibility Catt was drawing on a later post Silesian War conversation with Fritz for others.
Oh, I'm sure he was! I'm currently leaning toward at least some, maybe all, of that Katte execution account being real, because the only one I think believed both that he could see the execution from where he was and that he didn't because he fainted in time, is Fritz. Which is consistent with it being in Wilhelmine and pretty much nowhere else that I can think of.
But because of Catt's vanity, I no longer know *what* of the memoirs I can trust! Look at what he did to that "can't remember the name of the opera" episode! Curse him indeed.
it was much older Catt who put together the memoirs, the man who'd gone through a lot, including loss of wife and ignominous dismissal after a life time of service.
True, plus the Seven Years' War, which can be traumatic even as a civilian observing it at close range.
Okay, so total digression: the weirdest thing just happened.
Context: Me digging up every picture I could find of the inside of the Katte family crypt in Wust. They have a bulletin board (more than one, it looks like) with various relevant images, and some of the photographs capture shots of the bulletin board(s). I can no longer find the urls where I dug these pics up from (hence my obsessive downloading and archiving of everything), but they include useful shots like this, this, and most of all, this one.
Take a look at the portrait of the two young men in the last one. It's obviously two separate portraits that have been cropped and put side by side. The one on the right is Crown Prince Fritz as painted by Pesne in 1728. The one on the left has been driving me crazy for months. Every so often, I stare at every portrait of Hans Hermann I can find trying to make it be, if not that same portrait, a different portrait portraying the same individual. And I've never been able to convince myself that's him. Not helped by the fact that I'm partially face-blind, of course.
Today, reading your young-Catt-as-Bambi comment, I went to look up Catt's age in 1758 (33) in Wikipedia. And what should I find but that very portrait that's been bugging me because it doesn't quite look like Katte to me. Only Wikipedia thinks that's because it's actually a portrait of Henri de Catt, by Joachim Martin Falbe.
Do the Wust people have a picture of Catt up in the Katte crypt?? This is taking name confusion too far! Also, it makes me question my willingness to trust their birth and death dates for the various Katte family members over Wikipedia's. Sheesh.
One day, I will go to Germany, arrange a visit to Wust with you, and there will be a lot of question-asking. :P
ETA: Well, Asprey thinks it's Hans Hermann in his bio of Fritz. IDEK. Maybe Wikipedia is wrong. The chin looks pretty oval and the face generally less rounded compared to other portraits of Hans Hermann, but it's a portrait, not a photograph. I give up.
"obsessed with What Exactly Happened with Katte's Death, And Who Knew What When?"
Also LOL. It's an odd thing to be obsessed with, but I just remembered the last time I was working on an academic paper, interrupted by the advent of chronic pain, I was obsessing over the statistical distribution of the number of hair tresses on Greek statues of a particular type, so...academic progress is made of such mini-obsessions. ;)
maybe they're just not quite as obsessed with Katte
Lol, you'd think, but you know, if you glance at the Katte: Ordre und Kriegsartikel monograph, Kloosterhuis is pretty darn obsessed! Check out those footnotes. (I looked the guy up, he's an archivist by profession.) I can't claim to be half that obsessed. And yet. He cites Catt at face value for the Katte conversation, with no caveats. (Which I actually think is real, but I've only arrived at that conclusion tentatively and after assembling much indirect evidence.)
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 think the fact that the envoy reports include the "Fritz has renounced his right of succession" error but the correct info that his father pressured him to certainly hightens the likelihood the Danes had at least one person with access to all that material, including correspondance to and from Küstrin, in their pay. Possibly someone who delays potentially state endangering intel - like the demand on Fritz to remove himself from the succession only being mentioned when it is, in fact, no longer made.
And yes, I think all the letters Katte wrote to familiy members were copied first before behing delivered.
I would be curious if you dug up a library copy of the 1965 German translation of the diary
Further digging reveals that this is just a reprint of the Koser edition we've read, so anyone who uses it has no excuse for not knowing that Catt is a historical novelist.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
Re: Katte! - Envoy reports
His source is a German translation, of course, sigh. Good news, though: it's not just one report, it's all the reports pertaining to the escape, from August through December! I can't tell if they're all Danish or if they're a collection of reports (I can't even tell where it says the Nov 11 one is Danish or from Johnn), but I have uploaded NeuesBerlinischeMonatsschrift9, and the relevant pages are 324-349. Whenever you have time. (German sources are both good and bad, in that one person can read them really well and at great length, but two people not at all or only a little bit, and French sources we can all read a little bit, but nobody very well or at great length. I still prefer to have at least access to the original whenever possible, whichever language that might be.)
Anyway, I spotted Katte's arrest, and it matches Wilhelmine's description that he was just about to mount the horse when he was arrested. She's not making that up for sensationalist purposes; she's reporting what she heard. Which is probably sensationalist, but could also be true. I'd think it would have come up in the trial documents, though?
Like Wilhelmine, the envoy report also has Keith being warned in Wesel that the plot was betrayed, and fleeing only when he was warned. That really was the account that went around in the 18th century, and as far as I can tell, the only one that was transmitted orally. Wilhelmine has it, Fritz has it, Peter's son has it...the only source I've seen with my own eyes that has him leaving before that is Seckendorff, who says that when FW arrived in Geldern, which was evidently on the 12th, he learned that Keith had left Wesel "several days" before. Since Seckendorff was with FW at the time, the event was fresh news and practically local, and it was the official report to the King, I trust it more than I trust the accounts of people in Berlin who are playing games of telephone on the 19th. Plus there seems to be some source I have't seen that specifies he disappeared on the 6th. Probably in Kloosterhuis.
Oh, wow, yes, Kloosterhuis has Keith's quarters being inspected on the 7th, but he has also two unrelated things I didn't notice. One, it's Rottembourg's wife who calls Katte "charmant mais étourdi," which means all my sources saying Rottembourg was never married are wrong (I was thinking they might be, but wasn't sure). Two, Kloosterhuis just cites Fritz's judgment of Keith and Katte as "aimable, mais aussi étourdis que moi" in Catt like you can totally trust that conversation in Catt to be real. Wow, people really haven't gotten the memo about Catt.
[ETA: No! I was wrong. I was thinking Eva Sophie looked like a very German name for French envoy Count Rottembourg's wife, and then I got suspicious we had the wrong one. It's not impossible he married a German woman, but I thought it might be more likely to be Prussian Count Rothenburg's wife. So I looked it up, and Wikipedia tells me that Prussian Count Rothenburg married an Eva Sophie, plus the name I have for the maybe-wife of French Count Rothenburg/Rottembourg is Jeanne-Madelene. So correction to your Kloosterhuis write-up: Katte is friends with French envoy Count Rothenburg/Rottembourg, but it's Fritz's friend Prussian Count Rothenburg whose wife writes to Katte's stepmom that he's "charmant mais étourdi." Rothenburgs, seriously, could you be any more confusing? Also, we still don't know whether the French envoy was married or not. I think I'm going with no for my fic, but I'd still like to know.]
Going back to the embassy report after that digression, yes, Katte blows Fritz a kiss with his hand, not a hand-foot. And the official report gets the time right: between 7 and 8 am, and obviously the date. It also says Fritz was informed at 5 am. Two hours of offering his crown and his life a thousand times, ouch.
Oh, man, Katte blew Fritz a final kiss thinking he could see it, and Fritz never knew. Oh, right, he opened the archives. Okay, he didn't know for ten years. Unless someone told him, I guess.
Wow, if the FW order in the archive said he was supposed to watch, and the reports based on eyewitnesses said he did watch, no wonder he spent the rest of his life thinking that only fainting just in time had spared him.
I keep going back and forth on whether Münchow could be wrong--he was only 7!--but I keep concluding probably not. I'm not 100% sure, but the balance of evidence seems to come down in his favor on this point.
I suppose it's possible that Katte knows perfectly well that Fritz can't see him, but it's all he's got of Fritz, so he's staring in that direction, knowing Fritz is inside the building that he can glimpse a corner of, and blowing a kiss because he wants to, and maybe in hopes someone will tell Fritz. Or there's a window in sight, and Katte really thinks Fritz is in it.
Lol at Kloosterhuis saying the age-old controversy on whether Fritz could watch is "obsolet." What do you mean, obsolete? It's extremely important! It's the only thing I've thought about all week!
Anyway, 25 pages of new reports in the library, and no rush, royal reader. :D
Re: Katte! - Envoy reports
:(
I keep going back and forth on whether Münchow could be wrong--he was only 7!--but I keep concluding probably not. I'm not 100% sure, but the balance of evidence seems to come down in his favor on this point.
...yeah, I think you've marshalled the evidence pretty convincingly in his direction. And also he would know the building.
I suppose it's possible that Katte knows perfectly well that Fritz can't see him, but it's all he's got of Fritz, so he's staring in that direction, knowing Fritz is inside the building that he can glimpse a corner of, and blowing a kiss because he wants to, and maybe in hopes someone will tell Fritz. Or there's a window in sight, and Katte really thinks Fritz is in it.
Poor Katte :( At least Fritz did find out, eventually :(
Re: Katte! - Envoy reports
Yeah. I guess the best of ... FW's possible worlds is where they get to say goodbye, Fritz doesn't have to watch the sword fall, Katte gets the comfort of thinking he's looking at Fritz, and Fritz finds out about the kiss later, so...at least they (probably) got that?
Re: Katte! - Envoy reports
The reports in general are reasonably good in terms of what they claim, but far from error free. The last but one report is sure Fritz has renounced his right to the succession post Katte's execution, for example, and the report writer says that while this isn't yet generally known, he himself has seen the conditions, and quotes from them. (They incliude the promise never to claim the crown of Prussia at a later point, either.)
Now, obviously this did not happen, and in fact the whole reeducation program was in a way a confirmation that FW had decided to keep Fritz as Crown Prince after all. But I think it's possible someone leaked the October FW demand for Fritz to renounce his place in the sucession to the envoy, and Fritz' survival as opposed to Katte's execution was first interpreted as a sign he'd given in.
Also: the writer earlier says for all that FW is pissed off at the Brits, in actual fact he owes them because he, the writer, happens to know they tried to discourage, not encourage Fritz.
Wow, people really haven't gotten the memo about Catt.
Which is really weird, the more I think about it. I mean, the preface to the 1884 edition of his diary really lays it out in point by point detail. This is not news, even though it was to us. And yet, no one ever doubts Catt. (As opposed to most of the other memoirists.) I can only conclude that even the biographers who did go to the trouble of reading the diary as well as the memoirs skipped the preface...
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.
Catt's reliability
Well, that's true, but it's interesting that Catt's memoirs' unreliability does seem to be known in 1884 but somehow the knowledge seems to have gotten lost since then. Like, you'd expect that people would pass down that history as well, you know?
And also I feel like you and
maybe they're just not quite as obsessed with KatteAnd 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.
Re: Catt's reliability
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).
Re: Catt's reliability
You're probably right. Even among biographers aiming at making themselves stand out from all the previous biographies, "everyone else thinks that" is amazingly powerful. I mean, I didn't see either Jürgen Luh or Klosterhuis mentioning good old Henri de Catt might be less than reliable, either, and they both in different ways pitch themselves as "deconstructing legends".
Also: just think of the (in)famous "If they don't have bread, let them eat cake". Even within Marie Antoinette's lifetime, it was pointed out that this quote first started showing up years before she was born in an essay by Rousseau attributing it to "a princess". Various ladies got associated with it until MA got stuck with it, and ever since, biographers repeat she never said it. And still, pop culture has been so persuasive through the centuries that I dare say if you quiz ten non-historians and non-particularly-immersed-into-the-French-Revolution people, at least eight out of ten would spontanously name that quote, if they name anything, as something she said. One an idea, quote, cliché is there, people don't want to give it up. And Catt is the origin of many a treasured quote, scene, statement.
Re: Catt's reliability
I mean, I didn't see either Jürgen Luh or Klosterhuis mentioning good old Henri de Catt might be less than reliable, either
So what's interesting is I was searching the Kloosterhuis file for "Catt" just to make sure I wasn't missing anything, and no, I don't see where he does (unless it's just German fail on my part), but he does use the 1884 edition. Which means he either skipped the preface, or he knows perfectly well that Catt's not reliable and just doesn't feel the need to point that out to readers. The former seems unlikely, but the latter is definitely dropping the ball, especially with everyone out there just taking Catt at face value!
It's possible he's also come to the conclusion that the Katte anecdote is most likely real, and discussing Catt's unreliability in general is outside the scope of this work. That's a very charitable interpretation, especially since I personally would put a caveat around trusting Catt on Katte in a work on Katte, but maybe our priorities differ.
Also, I notice that the editor of the Catt diary + memoirs combo is none other than Reinhold Koser. Which I didn't know who that was when I first uploaded the file and you summarized the preface for us, but I do now, and that makes perfect sense. If there's one person I would trust to be so on top of 18th century sources that Catt's plagiarisms would jump out at him, it would be Koser. He has incredible attention to detail (terrible opinions, of course), and I said recently that I wish he had cited his sources for every half line in his volume on Fritz as Crown Prince, then I'd be in heaven. The reason Lavisse is even as good as he is is that he's drawing so heavily on Koser (and thank goodness Lavisse was translated into English for me).
Now I also wish Koser had felt the need to comment on the Katte conversation along with the military education in Catt. Gossipy sensationalist priorities, like you said. ;)
And Catt is the origin of many a treasured quote, scene, statement.
I know, I had built *so much* superstructure in terms of Fritz's character on Catt's work, and I'm having such a hard time letting it go. Both individual elements and my general sense of kind of knowing who Fritz was. If I were even slightly less rigorous (and most biographers are), I'd be going "LALALALALAAAA" at Catt's unreliability.
Re: Catt's reliability
Now I also wish Koser had felt the need to comment on the Katte conversation along with the military education in Catt. Gossipy sensationalist priorities, like you said. ;)
Also, don't Forget, Katte is "der schwache Mann", the weak man who lets Fritz talk him into things against his better judgment. (Something that's not in Koser is all the stuff Kloosterhuis unearthed about young Hans Herrmann's escapedes and toying with the idea to stay in England before his intimacy with the Crown Prince. I do suspect that has something to do with GB as an alternate destination to Paris for Fritz the Francophile.
Speaking of Kloosterhuis, him not putting a question mark on Catt if he's using the 1884 edition is odd, but it might really be because it's not his focus, and whether or not Fritz reallly talked to Catt about Katte isn't relevant to his central narrative.
I know, I had built *so much* superstructure in terms of Fritz's character on Catt's work, and I'm having such a hard time letting it go.
Well, the diary does confirm some pretty important stuff, and there's still the possibility Catt was drawing on a later post Silesian War conversation with Fritz for others. Curse his vanity for not saying so, if that's the case, of course. I must say that I am less inclined to buy young Henri de Catt as a naive innocent in fanfiction, which is probably unfair of me since it was much older Catt who put together the memoirs, the man who'd gone through a lot, including loss of wife and ignominous dismissal after a life time of service. Not to mention impending blindness. It's entirely possible his younger self was really a human Bambi.
Re: Catt's reliability
Like I said: good at facts, bad at opinions. :D
Also, I like how we're getting to know our historians. "Catt preface writer" is now "Koser" to us, with all that entails.
Spotting Catt was ripping off the military analysis from a 1780s publication which I bet even in the 1880s most historians weren't that familiar anymore being but one case in point.
Indeed, and reminder for
(I will take credit for tracking down the identities of the Danish ambassador with the name that has 5 widely variant spellings, none of which comes up in the Google search results for any of the others, and the Danish ambassador with the name "John". Because while Koser must have known all this, he didn't give me anything to go on besides the word "John", so some credit to me. :P)
Something that's not in Koser is all the stuff Kloosterhuis unearthed
Right, that was from the Katte letters, which Koser presumably didn't have access to, since they were...where, at Wust until 1945? As opposed to in the state archives?
Speaking of Kloosterhuis, him not putting a question mark on Catt if he's using the 1884 edition is odd, but it might really be because it's not his focus,
Yeah, I guess so, since it's just one passing comment about how Fritz referred to Katte as étourdi.
Well, the diary does confirm some pretty important stuff, and there's still the possibility Catt was drawing on a later post Silesian War conversation with Fritz for others.
Oh, I'm sure he was! I'm currently leaning toward at least some, maybe all, of that Katte execution account being real, because the only one I think believed both that he could see the execution from where he was and that he didn't because he fainted in time, is Fritz. Which is consistent with it being in Wilhelmine and pretty much nowhere else that I can think of.
But because of Catt's vanity, I no longer know *what* of the memoirs I can trust! Look at what he did to that "can't remember the name of the opera" episode! Curse him indeed.
it was much older Catt who put together the memoirs, the man who'd gone through a lot, including loss of wife and ignominous dismissal after a life time of service.
True, plus the Seven Years' War, which can be traumatic even as a civilian observing it at close range.
Okay, so total digression: the weirdest thing just happened.
Context: Me digging up every picture I could find of the inside of the Katte family crypt in Wust. They have a bulletin board (more than one, it looks like) with various relevant images, and some of the photographs capture shots of the bulletin board(s). I can no longer find the urls where I dug these pics up from (hence my obsessive downloading and archiving of everything), but they include useful shots like this, this, and most of all, this one.
Take a look at the portrait of the two young men in the last one. It's obviously two separate portraits that have been cropped and put side by side. The one on the right is Crown Prince Fritz as painted by Pesne in 1728. The one on the left has been driving me crazy for months. Every so often, I stare at every portrait of Hans Hermann I can find trying to make it be, if not that same portrait, a different portrait portraying the same individual. And I've never been able to convince myself that's him. Not helped by the fact that I'm partially face-blind, of course.
Today, reading your young-Catt-as-Bambi comment, I went to look up Catt's age in 1758 (33) in Wikipedia. And what should I find but that very portrait that's been bugging me because it doesn't quite look like Katte to me. Only Wikipedia thinks that's because it's actually a portrait of Henri de Catt, by Joachim Martin Falbe.
Do the Wust people have a picture of Catt up in the Katte crypt?? This is taking name confusion too far! Also, it makes me question my willingness to trust their birth and death dates for the various Katte family members over Wikipedia's. Sheesh.
One day, I will go to Germany, arrange a visit to Wust with you, and there will be a lot of question-asking. :P
ETA: Well, Asprey thinks it's Hans Hermann in his bio of Fritz. IDEK. Maybe Wikipedia is wrong. The chin looks pretty oval and the face generally less rounded compared to other portraits of Hans Hermann, but it's a portrait, not a photograph. I give up.
Re: Catt's reliability
Also LOL. It's an odd thing to be obsessed with, but I just remembered the last time I was working on an academic paper, interrupted by the advent of chronic pain, I was obsessing over the statistical distribution of the number of hair tresses on Greek statues of a particular type, so...academic progress is made of such mini-obsessions. ;)
maybe they're just not quite as obsessed with KatteLol, you'd think, but you know, if you glance at the Katte: Ordre und Kriegsartikel monograph, Kloosterhuis is pretty darn obsessed! Check out those footnotes. (I looked the guy up, he's an archivist by profession.) I can't claim to be half that obsessed. And yet. He cites Catt at face value for the Katte conversation, with no caveats. (Which I actually think is real, but I've only arrived at that conclusion tentatively and after assembling much indirect evidence.)
Re: Katte! - Envoy reports
I think the fact that the envoy reports include the "Fritz has renounced his right of succession" error but the correct info that his father pressured him to certainly hightens the likelihood the Danes had at least one person with access to all that material, including correspondance to and from Küstrin, in their pay. Possibly someone who delays potentially state endangering intel - like the demand on Fritz to remove himself from the succession only being mentioned when it is, in fact, no longer made.
And yes, I think all the letters Katte wrote to familiy members were copied first before behing delivered.
Re: Katte! - Envoy reports
Further digging reveals that this is just a reprint of the Koser edition we've read, so anyone who uses it has no excuse for not knowing that Catt is a historical novelist.