cahn | Frederick the Great discussion post 12

Thank you you for checking out this book!

Potsdam orphanage: that is terrible. And a really black mark against Friedrich.

Incidentally, re: socially beneficial institutions founded by FW, the most famous of these which is still ongoing is the Charité, the famous Berlin hospital. (Though it became famous for its high medical standards only in the later half of the 19th century.)

Citation for Fredersdorf buying a plantation? Is it in this book? Because I don't recall it mentioned in the sources we've had so far. As far as I know, over the years he bought additional estates once given Zernikow in 1740, which became the Fredersdorfischen Güter, but these were all within Brandenburg. Don't know whether directly attached to Zernikow. I'm ready to stand corrected - any additional information is welcome!

Citation for Fredersdorf buying a plantation? Is it in this book? Because I don't recall it mentioned in the sources we've had so far.

The source is not this book, but I explicitly remember reading that he bought a plantation in Mexico. This newspaper article mentions that Fredersdorf "bought a plantation in South America", and I'm assuming they're drawing from the same source I read that I can't remember. Giles MacDonogh writes that he had a 'colony' in the East Indies. His doesn't quote sources for each sentence but has a list of sources for the paragraph about Fredersdorf, in the frustrating truncated way he lays out his references. Since that information is in the first sentence, and the first reference in the list is Johannes Richter "Die Briefe Friedrichs des Grossen an seinen vormaligen Kammerdiener Fredersdorf" 1979, pages 20-21, I'm assuming the information is there.

Well! Despite both

selenak and me having read that article, and me having read MacDonogh, and her having read Richter, somehow both of us missed three references to it. Clearly, we needed you in this fandom and we never knew it!

His doesn't quote sources for each sentence but has a list of sources for the paragraph about Fredersdorf, in the frustrating truncated way he lays out his references.

MacDonogh is terribly unreliable about his sources actually saying what he says they say, but in this case, he's got it in one. Richter, page 20, "...kaufte Fredersdorf später noch mehrere Besitzungen hinzu, ja er wurde sogar, wie wir aus der früher erwähnten Urkunde des Grafen Schlitz wissen, Besitzer einer 'Kolonie' in Ostindien."

Aaaand, it does appear that the slave trade was thriving in the 18th century in the East Indies (about which I know virtually nothing and had to check).

:(

Nothing in Richter on South America or Mexico, or even the West Indies, that I can see, but I'm hindered by my rudimentary German. Still.

The past is a terrible place, I mean we already knew that. :( A few props to Fritz for speaking out about the slave trade, I guess, though Fredersdorf has some splainin to do.

Oh,

gambitten, you know about the Fritzian library I'm hosting? It has a lot of public domain (in the US) and borderline public domain resources, including Richter. (Which I thought was borderline public domain because 1926, but if there was another edition or printing in 1979, maybe I should rethink that.)

Yeah, the past is terrible. I suppose Fredersdorf took an "out of sight, out of mind" approach to morality.

you know about the Fritzian library I'm hosting?

Yeah! I'll offer up some more public domain Volz from archive.org that doesn't seem to be on there yet - it's the Grumbkow-Hille-Wolden correspondence, which gives insight into Friedrich's mindset/behaviour at Küstrin as well as other things.

My German is rudimentary too, but I see a pretty sad entry on pages 15 to 16:

Hille to Grumbkow, 23rd of December 1730

"[You?] will have heard from the King from the relay sent yesterday that the Crown Prince had two attacks of Wechselfieber [malaria]. So much excitement, grief and fear must have had a violent effect on his body. Thank God it didn't result in anything more serious(...)" (cont but Google Translate struggles)

I suppose it would be better to post about it on the new discussion topic, hah.

Edited 2020-03-07 21:23 (UTC)

Yeah, the past is terrible. I suppose Fredersdorf took an "out of sight, out of mind" approach to morality.

Let's just acknowledge that I personally would be a terrible person in the past.

Yeah! I'll offer up some more public domain Volz from archive.org that doesn't seem to be on there yet - it's the Grumbkow-Hille-Wolden correspondence, which gives insight into Friedrich's mindset/behaviour at Küstrin as well as other things.

Oh, that's the first volume of the three-volume work I've been trying to get from our royal patron! I don't know why I didn't see it on archive.org. Oh, it looks like they only have the first volume, so maybe I ignored it in favor of getting all three volumes from the same source.

I don't suppose you have access to download entire volumes from Hathitrust? I was assuming you didn't, because it's US-only, but it doesn't hurt to ask?

(cont but Google Translate struggles)

I think I've noticed you saying this before. If you ever want to post something and ask for help, we have a native German speaker here, and with my year or two of German at school, I usually don't have trouble getting the gist of a text when Google Translate struggles. I usually get it, sometimes miss nuance, rarely get stumped, and frequently ask

selenak just to double check my understanding, especially if I'm using the passage to base an argument on. ;) I'm actually just happy that she usually confirms I understood it correctly!

Anyway, you can get basic German support from me and advanced German support from her, if you ever have any questions. And I occasionally post something short in German or French on the assumption that everyone here can handle a sentence or two, but if that's no longer true, then I can get better about translating. And feel free to poke if I don't.

For example, that Fredersdorf quote from Richter says that Fredersdorf later acquired still more possessions, and as we learned in the Count Schlitz document mentioned earlier, he even became the owner of a 'colony' in the East Indies.

And yeah, I suppose we should drift over to the new place. :)

I don't suppose you have access to download entire volumes from Hathitrust? I was assuming you didn't, because it's US-only, but it doesn't hurt to ask?

Sorry for the late reply on this; unfortunately, I don't. Oxford isn't on the list of partner institutions rip

Re: Google Translate

My issue is that I can't read the old-timey German font that everything 18th-century Prussian-related is written in. :\ And neither, apparently, can Google Translate (for archive PDFs my go-to has been taking pictures of my laptop screen with my phone and using GT that way, which is extremely inefficient, I realise). If it's in regular font, I'm usually fine with a bit of German (thanks to Duolinguo LOL). I feel bad asking for translations for minute things that I'm curious about, since I don't want to take up anybody's time

Sorry for the late reply on this; unfortunately, I don't. Oxford isn't on the list of partner institutions rip

No worries, we have someone at UCLA who does.

My issue is that I can't read the old-timey German font that everything 18th-century Prussian-related is written in.

Neither could I in December, but I'm getting better at it! As measured by: how much less angry when I see the font, lol. Occasionally, something relevant even jumps out at me when I'm scrolling while looking for something else! I'm still much slower with it than with more familiar typefaces, but I'm now only totally defeated by it when it's a very blurry scan.

I feel bad asking for translations for minute things that I'm curious about, since I don't want to take up anybody's time

At the moment I have nothing but time, but that's going to change in a couple weeks. In any case, you can always ask, and it might end up on somebody's backlog.

selenak took a few weeks to get us the full Katte species facti translation (and that wasn't even in blackletter font), but she did it! For which we are deeply grateful and do not at all mind the delay. Everyone here is understanding that everyone else is fitting Fritz into their spare time.

I do intend to continue incorporating the recently uncovered Katte execution material into

rheinsberg, as time and health permit, and that will include the Lepel report from Hoffbauer that you expressed an interest in. I would like to get that done before I have to go back to work, but even when I go back, I'm not full time, so hopefully I continue to have time to participate in fandom. Even if the nature of that participation shifts, hopefully from more mindless work like OCR cleanup, to more interesting stuff like reading books and possibly maybe just within the realm of possibility, beefing up my French. And maybe fanfic!

Pro tip on Google translate: if the blackletter font is in a copy-pastable PDF, it's usually pretty good about OCRing properly and all you usually have to do is swap out the s's manually to get a better translation. But if it's just an image, then yeah, you have to be able to transcribe yourself. Which I can now do a page or two at a time of, but in December I just deferred altogether, and you're certainly welcome to ask for help. It never hurts to ask, especially if you're willing to wait for the response.

Wait, Google translate can read your pictures?! Or am I misunderstanding your workflow?

Yep. The Google Translate app on Android can translate pictures, but even it seems to struggle with old-timey German fonts and scanned artifacts. I use it when the text is not selectable, which is usually the case for old scans.

Oh, that's really cool! Though I can hardly blame it for having trouble with old German fonts :)

Yeah, join the club, Google!

Okay, I just checked Richter, and what he says on page 20 is that „in addition to the Zernickow estate, which he administrated exemplarly (...), Fredersdorf later bought other estates, and even became, as we know through the earlier mentioned document of Count Schlitz, the owner of a „colony“ in East India.“ Ostindien is British India, „Kolonie“ is written in quote marks by Richter, which doesn‘t indicate irony - Richter doesn‘t do irony - but presumably an old fashioned use of the term. For example, the French huguenot settlement in Berlin was called „die Kolonie“. Conversely, maybe he does mean a plantation - at a guess, tea or pepper, givne India‘s most common exports. Either way, I could be wrong, but I don‘t think British India did slaves in the second half of the 18th century. (Though the slave trade certainly was still going strong with British traders to other colonies.) No mention of South America or Mexico, or any other overseas possession. The next sentence is about beer.

ETA: Oh, I see you already found the sentence. The „earlier mentioned document“ refers to the one in which Fredersdorf‘s widow doesn‘t sign herself „von“, which is how Richter concludes Fredersdorf wasn‘t ennobled. Also, belatedly it’s occured to me that before the demise of the East India Trading Company it‘s not British India yet, but in terms of 18th century use of the term „Ostindien“ in the fictional texts I‘ve seen it in, it was employed for the continent and not the islands. Again: „I could be wrong“ caveat, big time.

Edited 2020-03-07 22:08 (UTC)

Either way, I could be wrong, but I don‘t think British India did slaves in the second half of the 18th century.

Hmm. What I had found was that Wikipedia says the Dutch East India Company was involved in slaving in the 18th century, though whether that geographically lines up with the use of the German term Ostindien in the 18C, I'm not sure. It looks like most of the focus on slavery in Wikipedia is the Cape Colony, which is a very specific location on the African continent (Cape of Good Hope). I don't know about slavery practiced by the East Indies company outside of that region, and I don't know if Fredersdorf could have had his "Kolonie" (whatever that is) in one of the slave-based regions.

This person, of unknown scholarly rigor, is making a case that the British East Indies engaged in the slave trade, and that this aspect has been downplayed in the literature due to the low numbers relative to the transatlantic slave trade.

Wikipedia says "Ostindien" is "a historical designation for a large region in Asia, consisting of the Vorderindien (roughly the Indian subcontinent), Mainland Southeast Asia (Hinterindien) and the East Indies Islands." It predates the later use of the term for British India.

To what extent slavery was widespread there, as opposed to the Cape Colony in South Africa, I don't know.

So for now, I'm going to say Fredersdorf's possible involvement as an overseas slaveowner is inconclusive. If he was dealing with either the British or Dutch East Indies companies, he certainly profited indirectly from the slave trade, but then, who didn't? All that tobacco's got to come from somewhere, and I don't think most of it was what you'd call ethical labor practices.

Wow. So far Fredersdorf has been accused of murder, embezzlement, and slaveowning, and so far he's eluded a guilty verdict on all three! (Please let it stay that way, she says, ever the objective historian.)

Frederick the Great discussion post 12

Re: Trenck discussion

Re: Trenck discussion

Fredersdorf

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Re: Trenck discussion

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