Frederick the Great discussion post 12

[cahn]

Every time I am amazed and enchanted that this is still going on! Truly DW is the Earthly Paradise!

All the good stuff continues to be archived at rheinsberg :)

Comments

Re: Frederick for Americans?

[mildred_of_midgard]

These are not hardcore Frederick people.

I figured. If they're hardcore enough to care about the escape attempt, they're hardcore enough to know where the sites are and aren't.

If they do head to Berlin I will hit you all up!

Please do! I did a whole Sanssouci tour guide over in rheinsberg, and we can totally supplement it with all the Berlin proper stuff.

Thank you for sharing the tidbits available, as I get to hear about things like hey did anyone tell you about this one time a future monarch spent a night in jail, as one does.

Even funnier, Frederick never ever admitted this happened, and if he hadn't brought his younger brother along on the trip, we would never know. It was his brother who wrote, "Hey, we totally spent the night under arrest!"

a future monarch

No, it gets even funnier. He wasn't even a future monarch. This was about two months after he'd acceded to the throne. He was the current monarch of Prussia, detained in France for forging his own passport and sneaking over the border! The reason was that he wanted to travel incognito and enjoy being a tourist like a private person and not be recognized as a monarch. Well, he was recognized very quickly, and also apparently he got detained (I don't have the details on that, maybe selenak does*) before the officials straightened everything out in the morning. So his plan to spend a lot of time doing tourism was aborted very quickly.

This fandom is chock-full of crazy anecdotes. :D

* ETA: I actually realized I don't even remember if "jail" is overstating it and it was house arrest or something similar, but the point is, he and his companions were apparently detained against their will until the paperwork situation was straightened out the next day, and it was embarrassing enough to Fritz that it NEVER HAPPENED. Much like that time Old Fritz supposedly fell off his horse during a military review, and the younger officers wanted to go see if he needed help, while the older ones knew enough to go "LALALALA nothing to see here!" Which was 100% the right move. :P