cahn | Frederick the Great discussion post 11

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In our last installment, our heroes found that Henri de Catt's memoirs, a major source for current biographers of Frederick the Great, are not to be trusted!!

rheinsberg

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From:

mildred_of_midgard

MAJOR side-eye that couldn't wait until my next major Blanning update:

You know how I said I understood a lot about Wikipedia when I realized that Fritzian wiki pages like to cite MacDonogh?

And you know how I've been complaining about Blanning's reliance on urls? Not because I think sources on the internet are inherently inferior in rigor (I've read too many books to believe this), but because links can disappear forever?

Blanning just put a url to a wiki article down as his only citation. Not Wikipedia, Potsdam Wiki. The only citation given for the Potsdam Wiki article is the corresponding Wikipedia article. I then go look at the Wikipedia article, and at least today, it doesn't say what the Potsdam Wiki article says. And Blanning has omitted one important point that was in the Potsdam Wiki article. But who knows if it was actually there when he read the article!

Oh, look, it was. He at least gave the date on which he accessed the article, and I checked the wiki's version history, and it hasn't been updated since he accessed it. So!

Behold, this is Blanning's scholarship ("scholarship") process. The question: when and why did Fritz's construction inspecter Manger get cashiered?

Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, which is a major source for Wikipedia, and which I've found to be very unreliable, says:

M. remained the sole director until 1786...In the meantime he had fallen out of favor with the king in these six years because of his completely unjustified distrust, which even brought him to prison for a fortnight, from which he was only released after the death of the great king.

Based on this and possibly other sources, Wikipedia says,

Due to disputes with Frederick the Great, who accused him of poor management and unfaithfulness in office, he was arrested in 1786 and only restored after Friedrich's death in the same year by his successor on the Prussian throne Friedrich Wilhelm II.

Potsdam Wiki, citing only Wikipedia, says,

A dispute with Frederick II led to Manger ending up in prison in July 1786. Manger had submitted a quote that the king found too expensive. Because a lot of material had also disappeared on the construction sites, he considered Manger to be a thief and fraud. The king died in August 1786. His successor, Friedrich Wilhelm the Second, took Manger out of prison.

Blanning, citing only Potsdam Wiki, says,

When the long-serving building director Heinrich Ludwig Manger submitted an estimate deemed to be excessive, he found himself denounced as a thief and a swindler and dispatched to prison. He was soon released, but only because Frederick died the following month.

So Blanning omits the part where it wasn't just the high cost but the fact that materials had been disappearing that had Fritz suspicious, which in turn Blanning's source gives no citation on, so I don't even know if that's true or not, and you have to go all the way back to Wikipedia to find a couple sources given that may or may not contain what Blanning and/or Potsdam Wiki says they contain.

So while I'm here, I'll comment on the previous sentence in Blanning, which I had highlighted as a minor side-eye and which I was going to leave until my write-up until I got to the wiki link and had to stop reading long enough to bitch. The previous sentence reads:

Of Frederick's numerous readers-cum-librarians, only two—the first (Jordan) and the last (Dantal)—were not cashiered.

Now, off the top of my head, I can name La Mettrie as another exception, assuming my multiple sources on that are unreliable, so...side-eye! Citation is Friedrich der Grosse als Leser (2012), which I've had my eye on for a while, but I can't find it cheaper than about $85, so no.

Anyway, I started reading Asprey's bio, now that I've got it digitized (thanks to my fancy new scanner), and *his* approach seems to be, "If I don't cite my sources, Mildred can't pick them apart, right? :D You decide which is right, and which is an illusion." (Moody Blues allusion there.)

I.e., he cites some sources, but not nearly enough.

But like someone once told me in my first month of grad school, after realizing the "older students give advice" conversation had effectively just ruled out me reading any of the major authors in the field because they were all deeply flawed, "Well, we can say, 'don't read this author,' and 'don't read that one,' but if you keep that up, you'll never be able to read anything. So read them all, but just be aware they have problems."

So back I go.

Side note: something that always drives me crazy when writing for publication is realizing that my only source for an important part of my argument is something a professor once said during a long-ago lecture.

From:

selenak

Briefly, because in haste - Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie as far as I know is the digitized form of a late 19th century source with all the biases you'd expect, and none of the Information learned since then.