I must say, all the "I totally saw through Fritz, Mom!...during the sixteen hours per day we talked to each other" cracks me up to no end. (I mean. 16 hours? Per day?)
That jumped out at me too! Haha, Joseph.
MT: You realize any mother would see right through this?
ViennaJoe: Mooom! You should know all about being a sleepless workaholic. Of course we talked for sixteen hours per day! It was very important for, um, foreign affairs, and the well-being of our countries, and stuff. Look, I'm very dedicated to my job!
Volz, bw, has a more thorough version of Joseph's letter in his "Gespräche mit Friedrich dem Großen"
Oh, nice, I'm glad that turned out to have useful material.
in order to be polite, Fritz and his entourage wore the Austrian white uniforms "to spare the Austrians the sight of the Prussian blue (they) have encountered on the field so often", as one of the Austrian delegation was told, who in his letter snarked, you know, we could have born the sight, and also it wouldn't have showcased the King's tobacco snuff as much as the white uniform did.
Everything about this makes me laugh so hard, from Fritz's arrogance to the Austrian snark. I kind of suspect the Austrian might be underestimating the extent to which the snuff is impossible to miss on any uniform, given the sheer number of other reports we have throughout the decades that read "I saw the King for five minutes from a distance, and the number one thing I noticed was that he was covered in snuff from head to toe." Maybe it's *more* visible on white, I don't know how dark 18C Spanish snuff was, but I suspect trying not to showcase it was a lost cause. Definitely not worth giving up that amazingly arrogant move, either way. ILU, problematic fave. :P
(Fritz: You don't think Heinrich would have gotten anything from anyone if I weren't awesome, do you? Heinrich: You don't think you'd have gotten anything other than pissing everone else off AGAIN if you' been the one to negotiate, do you?)
LOL. They both have a point, I think? But far be it from either of them to acknowledge this.
There is a famous but apocryphal quip by Fritz which gets quoted on this a lot, but no one has ever been able to find it in any of his letters or even in his described conversations in other people's memoirs, so biographers were reluctantly forced to admit that it was probably invented after the fact by other people but sounded so much like something he would have said that it stuck.
Aww, I didn't know it was apocryphal! That's too bad. I guess when you're known for wit, you accumulate quotes that sound witty. Churchill, Wilde, and Twain know all about this.
ETA: And I have made my own rhyming, not prose translation! *shares wit pride*
*applauds*
Elaborating further on the argument that the very thing which made Fritz great was his imperfection
I definitely think Goethe's onto something there. Fritz's inability to back down was his single most salient trait, and it manifested in good, bad, and making-a-name-for-himself ways. His whole life is a very interesting intersection of innate personality, environment, and trauma. And while I think he might have been expansionist without the trauma, and he always would have preferred French, I do suspect some of his need to attack German while never ever reading it came from FW bludgeoning him with German for so long. (cahn, as one small example, he was only allowed to speak German and people were only allowed to speak German to him at Küstrin.) I think hating German, as opposed to loving French, became part of his fight for his identity, long after FW was gone and he'd lost sight of the reason for the fight.
Re: He said, she said, they said: on partitioning Poland and other matters
That jumped out at me too! Haha, Joseph.
MT: You realize any mother would see right through this?
ViennaJoe: Mooom! You should know all about being a sleepless workaholic. Of course we talked for sixteen hours per day! It was very important for, um, foreign affairs, and the well-being of our countries, and stuff. Look, I'm very dedicated to my job!
Volz, bw, has a more thorough version of Joseph's letter in his "Gespräche mit Friedrich dem Großen"
Oh, nice, I'm glad that turned out to have useful material.
in order to be polite, Fritz and his entourage wore the Austrian white uniforms "to spare the Austrians the sight of the Prussian blue (they) have encountered on the field so often", as one of the Austrian delegation was told, who in his letter snarked, you know, we could have born the sight, and also it wouldn't have showcased the King's tobacco snuff as much as the white uniform did.
Everything about this makes me laugh so hard, from Fritz's arrogance to the Austrian snark. I kind of suspect the Austrian might be underestimating the extent to which the snuff is impossible to miss on any uniform, given the sheer number of other reports we have throughout the decades that read "I saw the King for five minutes from a distance, and the number one thing I noticed was that he was covered in snuff from head to toe." Maybe it's *more* visible on white, I don't know how dark 18C Spanish snuff was, but I suspect trying not to showcase it was a lost cause. Definitely not worth giving up that amazingly arrogant move, either way. ILU, problematic fave. :P
(Fritz: You don't think Heinrich would have gotten anything from anyone if I weren't awesome, do you?
Heinrich: You don't think you'd have gotten anything other than pissing everone else off AGAIN if you' been the one to negotiate, do you?)
LOL. They both have a point, I think? But far be it from either of them to acknowledge this.
There is a famous but apocryphal quip by Fritz which gets quoted on this a lot, but no one has ever been able to find it in any of his letters or even in his described conversations in other people's memoirs, so biographers were reluctantly forced to admit that it was probably invented after the fact by other people but sounded so much like something he would have said that it stuck.
Aww, I didn't know it was apocryphal! That's too bad. I guess when you're known for wit, you accumulate quotes that sound witty. Churchill, Wilde, and Twain know all about this.
ETA: And I have made my own rhyming, not prose translation! *shares wit pride*
*applauds*
Elaborating further on the argument that the very thing which made Fritz great was his imperfection
I definitely think Goethe's onto something there. Fritz's inability to back down was his single most salient trait, and it manifested in good, bad, and making-a-name-for-himself ways. His whole life is a very interesting intersection of innate personality, environment, and trauma. And while I think he might have been expansionist without the trauma, and he always would have preferred French, I do suspect some of his need to attack German while never ever reading it came from FW bludgeoning him with German for so long. (