Somehow I knew you'd ask me to check out the Fredersdorf letters sooner or later. ;)
You're only surprised I waited this long! ;)
Glasses: Hahn doesn't pretend this was an original discovery of his
Oh, I didn't think it was. I'm just saying, if nobody is commenting on it, it's probably because half the biographers don't know. (We've seen how hard it is to get people to question Catt, just because nobody else is doing it, even though it was known to people like Koser and Volz over a hundred years ago.)
What are his sources, btw?
Now some of his conclusions I don't agree with - that Fritz might simply have disliked the hunt because he could never have been able to hit anything
I agree with you, I think he disliked the hunt because 1) it's boring like sitting in the tobacco parliament is boring, 2) Dad is ramming it down his throat, 3) distant third, it's cruelty to animals. Not being able to hit anything is probably a feature rather than a bug at this point. :P
As for Catt not bringing it up in his memoirs: no matter how hurt his feelings were by his dismissal, I suspect a) this was too personal, and too painful because he himself was rapidly losing his sight, he knew how that felt
True, I guess we know neither when he lost his sight (I still don't have a source for this beyond Wikipedia, though maybe you do) and when he started composing the memoirs?
When Fritz read to him from his poetry or Racine, short sightedness would not have been a problem.
You mean because he knew the text almost by heart and only needed a bit of prompting? Because if I'm reading from a book without my glasses, you're going to notice me holding it very close to my nose and moving the page and/or my head around every few lines to home in on the next bit of text. (I tried it just now to confirm.)
And as Hahn says, in the field Fritz had all the excuse in the world to keep using a spy glass to trace the enemy's position and the like, and he had people reporting to him movements etc.
Yes, I've been trying to think through the implications, and when I thought about his famous coup d'œil (cahn, that's a military history term for "ability to figure out the best way to deploy troops by looking at the terrain"), and all the troop reviews, etc. I realized that of course he'd be using a spyglass.
Man, I would not live in the 18th century for anything.
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Re: Peter-Michael Hahn
Date: 2020-03-01 07:33 pm (UTC)You're only surprised I waited this long! ;)
Glasses: Hahn doesn't pretend this was an original discovery of his
Oh, I didn't think it was. I'm just saying, if nobody is commenting on it, it's probably because half the biographers don't know. (We've seen how hard it is to get people to question Catt, just because nobody else is doing it, even though it was known to people like Koser and Volz over a hundred years ago.)
What are his sources, btw?
Now some of his conclusions I don't agree with - that Fritz might simply have disliked the hunt because he could never have been able to hit anything
I agree with you, I think he disliked the hunt because 1) it's boring like sitting in the tobacco parliament is boring, 2) Dad is ramming it down his throat, 3) distant third, it's cruelty to animals. Not being able to hit anything is probably a feature rather than a bug at this point. :P
As for Catt not bringing it up in his memoirs: no matter how hurt his feelings were by his dismissal, I suspect a) this was too personal, and too painful because he himself was rapidly losing his sight, he knew how that felt
True, I guess we know neither when he lost his sight (I still don't have a source for this beyond Wikipedia, though maybe you do) and when he started composing the memoirs?
When Fritz read to him from his poetry or Racine, short sightedness would not have been a problem.
You mean because he knew the text almost by heart and only needed a bit of prompting? Because if I'm reading from a book without my glasses, you're going to notice me holding it very close to my nose and moving the page and/or my head around every few lines to home in on the next bit of text. (I tried it just now to confirm.)
And as Hahn says, in the field Fritz had all the excuse in the world to keep using a spy glass to trace the enemy's position and the like, and he had people reporting to him movements etc.
Yes, I've been trying to think through the implications, and when I thought about his famous coup d'œil (
Man, I would not live in the 18th century for anything.