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

Fredersdorf

[mildred_of_midgard]

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.)

Re: Fredersdorf

[gambitten]

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.

Re: Fredersdorf

[mildred_of_midgard]

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. :)

Re: Fredersdorf

[gambitten]

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

Re: Fredersdorf

[mildred_of_midgard]

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.

Re: Fredersdorf

[cahn]

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

Re: Fredersdorf

[gambitten]

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.

Re: Fredersdorf

[cahn]

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

Re: Fredersdorf

[mildred_of_midgard]

Yeah, join the club, Google!