"Nothing ought to give us so great a distaste for writing, as the multitude of books with which Europe is overwhelmed."
ROTFlOL. That is golden. Thank you so much for this overview on the English-accessible Fritz writings. Also, poor Maupertuis. Captured by the Austrians, dissed by Voltaire, and even his boss and defender doesn't regard him as top of the intellectual crop. (Then again, Maupertuis suggested vivisections on prisoners, so...)
Your google book link won't work for me and tells me I maxed out my google excerpt time for this month, but:
Elisabeth, first wife of FW2, and the scandal around her arrest: gets mentioned in Lehndorff's diaries a lot, which I did quote from in my original write up of same. Lehndorff does mention - and believe - the rumor of her having planned a coup with her lovers, but I haven't seen anyone non-contemporary believe the "coup" part. (Lehndorff tends to be jump to "Messalina!" conclusions in any Queen + lover scenario pretty easily when he hears gossip about them; there are two other examples after Elisabeth.) One reason why I doubt it myself is that Fritz originally intended to send Elisabeth back to her mother, his sister Charlotte - who refused to take her and completely condemned her -, before life long banishment to Stettin (after the initial few months in Küstrin were over) became his decision. Fritz also put the blame on the entire situation squarely on future FW2's shoulders in his "he neglected her charms, and thus she started to cheat" statement which made it into the biographies I've read and was cited as being in the Histoire de mon Temps. I very much doubt he'd have done that if he'd thought Elisabeth was planning a coup, as opposed to having extramarital sex for its own sake. (Pangels quotes a similar "he neglected her charms" statement from a letter from Fritz to Charlotte, too, as an example of Fritz' generous nature, though of course she does not mention that Fritz' own record re: neglecting the charms of one's wife is, well...)
Elisabeth, btw, outlived everyone else and made sure in her will she would not be buried anywhere near her mother in Braunschweig. She understandably did not forgive Charlotte.
lifelong imprisonment in the Castle of Stettin
I would qualify the term "imprisonment" here. When Lehndorff & his second wife come through Stettin in the mid 1770s, we get this description (which also shows his attitude to Elisabeth has changed from "OMG she totally was the Prussian Messalina and wanted to kill Crown Prince Jr. with her lovers!" to "I feel sorry for her": With some pity, I see the former Princess of Prussia, who now lives as Princess Elisabeth banished in Stettin. She has the permission to stroll around as she pleases, which she uses amply. (...) The whole distraction the Princess Elisabeth can take is visiting two or three ladies of Stettin society who can hardly be called charming. No gentleman dares to talk to her, other than the fat Duke of Bevern. She dresses in a strange manner, but as she is beautiful, everything suits her well, wherereas the ladies of Stettin who try to imitate her look absurd - two short skirts so one could confuse them with bad ballet dangers, and the heads full of curls so that they look like Medusa from afar. Whereas when I look at the Princess form afar while she strolls down the promenade, she appears like Diana to me. Her pretty little foot is visible, and her legs well above her ankle; she wears a pink corset which suits her beautifully. (...) My wife pays her respect to Princess Elisabeth and returns delighted by her, singing her praises. She claims the Princess is well content, but I can't help but think she must be unhappy.
Later Lehndorff diary entries include rumors that she has started to have affairs again (though these are only rumors he's heard, not personal observations). Ferdinand's daughter, Princess Radziwill, mentions somwewhere visiting Elisabeth and being somewhat at a loss on what to say since Elisabeth was utterly unembarrassed and not sorry at all for anything. A case probably can be made therefore for Stettin, after a while, being firstly exile/banishment rather than imprisonment and later then self chosen place of residence. I could be wrong, and I can't find a citation for it right now, but I think she had the option to leave it later and refused.
Lack of interest in the matter stopping 21st century historians, or is it the archives themselves still?]
At a guess, the former. Given that biographers in the last few decades had no problem getting at the unpublished correspondances between various Hohenzollern siblings (AW with everyone, or the Marwitz letters from the Fritz/Heinrich correspondance which had not been included in any pre WWII editions that I know of). While the scandal around the Elisabeth/FW2 divorce happpened within Fritz' lifetime, it just wasn't of much interest to even deconstructing Fritz biographers, as it had little to do with him (beyond the marriage having been his idea to begin with). And FW2 never got many biographies devoted to himself. There's one more recent mentioned in his German wiki entry, which may delve into Elisabeth as well.
Re: the unpublished AW letters in particular, recent biographers I've seen quoting from them were Ziebura, Oster, Luh; even Jessen has one letter of his to Mina (Princess Heinrich), though without looking those up, I can't tell you where they physically are (Berlin, Trier, Bayreuth?). The website devoted to Wilhelmine's France and Italian journey which I linked at Rheinsberg has his letters to and from Wilhelmine and her husband during that time online.
"There were also women at court who kept diaries. Those that have been handed down to us are from the lady-in-waiting Sophie von Voss and from princess Wilhelmina (“Prinzessin Heinrich”), the wife of Wilhelmina’s uncle Henry of Prussia."
Both get quoted amply by Ziebura in her various Hohenzollern biographies; the former (Sophie von Voss, née von Pannewitz, daughter of the FW puncher, herself object of AW romantic interest, aunt of FW2's morganatic wife Julie) is available in German in print; the same publisher who republished the original Lehndorff diary collection (i.e. the first volume without any of the subsequent ones) previously also had republished hers. This renewed the copyright in Germany, btw, which means no online accessibility for me re: the original editions. Sophie lived long enough to see Napoleon defeated, so her diaries cover many decades of Prussian court life.
Pöllnitz: Lehndorff mentions reading his unpublished memoirs repeatedly during the 1750s. Mind you, he also mentions Pöllnitz (in person, not in writing) at one point admitting he absolutely invents stuff when he feels like it.
Hohenzollern ensorship in general: was heavy, absolutely. As I mentioned elswhere, until 1918, every single historian who'd gotten access to the archives had to submit their subsequent publication for inspection and censorship. Mostly because the narrative as pointed out by Hahn that Preuss first detailed and which justified both Prussian and Hohenzollern rule over Germany.
Then again, Maupertuis suggested vivisections on prisoners, so..
Wait... what? :/ When was this suggestion? My familiarity with Maupertuis only extends to his scientific endeavors (they influence Friedrich's scientific beliefs, which I want to post about at some point when I have more time) and his quarrel with Voltaire.
Re: Google book. My memory is failing me again, because I have read your write-up, but the passages about Elizabeth slipped my mind. Thank you for the write-up. I'd actually discovered the book because I was looking for information concerning the original manuscript of Lehndorff's diary - Giles MacDonogh had written on his blog that "both Trakehnen and Steinort seem to have miraculously survived [the Second World War] in some form, although the latter lost all its contents, even the manuscript of Ernst Ahasverus Lehndorff’s diary" so I guess it was destroyed.
Both get quoted amply by Ziebura in her various Hohenzollern biographies
I wish there were English versions, or just digital German versions of Ziebura's works so I could read them. And digital versions of the full Hohenzollern sibling correspondences! Alas, it is not to be.
McDonogh is wrong! (Well, mostly.) Since Lehndorff wrote diaries for decades, starting in 1750, there isn't just one manuscript. There are a lot of them. Some of which were indeed destroyed in WWII, but the rest of the original diaries still exist. They are at the state archive in Leipzig, here. (The surviving diaries are in this subsection of the archive.
(Re: the destroyed ones, one reason to be very grateful to Schmidt-Lötzens translations, otherwise they'd be lost forever.)
The Lehndorff Family Archive in Leipzig also has the manuscripts from our Lehndorff's ancestor the baroque globetrotter, who named himself Ahasverus and thus burdened his descendants with that name. ;) They look like a real treasure trove, but reading hand written (mostly) French manuscripts is beyond me, I fear...
Die Idee des medizinischen Strafvollzugs war dem gebildeten Bürgertum vertraut und basierte auf aristotelischen Theorien, die im Zuge der Rückbesinnung auf die Antike neue Relevanz erhielten. Befürwortet wurde die Vivisektion zum Beispiel von Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, dem Arzt nach dem bezeichnenderweise die Köpfmaschine der französischen Revolution benannt wurde. Auch Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, Präsident der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin, schlug vor, Hinrichtungen durch die Erprobung neuartiger Operationsmethoden und durch Experimente mit Giften und Antidota zu ersetzen und in die Hände der Ärzte zu legen.
Son of ETA: For more about the fate of the Lehndorff diaries, see this 2002 essay, published before there was a reprint (which happened in 2007).
Huh. OK, I have a bit more sympathy in context -- scientist!me does rather think that he is right that vivisection would in fact be a really great way to learn about the human body. It is probably a good thing that scientist!me has twenty-first century ethics drummed into me and no actual power to do whatever kinds of experiments I want :P
I mean, it's still a terrible idea, and it sounds from the article that even in the 18th C people realized this (although I think it's sort of hilarious that if I'm parsing google translate correctly, a major objection was from people who wanted the corpses for teaching purposes) -- so, yeah, I'll take this as at least partial further evidence that Maupertuis wasn't actually the deepest of thinkers. (I mean, not that deep scientific thinkers are necessarily the deepest ethical thinkers at any time!)
(As I told gambitten upthread, Zinsser's Emilie bio also really doesn't think Maupertuis's intellect is All That.)
I wish there were English versions, or just digital German versions of Ziebura's works so I could read them. And digital versions of the full Hohenzollern sibling correspondences! Alas, it is not to be.
I knooooooow! I super want to read Ziebura and the full sibling correspondences too! You think she might get her stuff translated if we write to her and tell her there are three of us who are seriously big fans but can't read German and reeeeeeally want an English version? :) (I know, I'm kidding. Mostly.)
You probably have seen mildred's machine translations of the letters at Trier but that's of course super incomplete, sigh.
If you're willing to pay for 1) the copy of whatever Ziebura book(s) you want translated, and 2) more books as bribes for my time and labor, there's nothing stopping me from machine translating Ziebura for you, now that I have my library-digitizing technology. If you're interested, talk to me once I'm done with Poniatowski. (It's coming along, a little every day.)
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Keeping Up With the (Censoring) Hohenzollerns
ROTFlOL. That is golden. Thank you so much for this overview on the English-accessible Fritz writings. Also, poor Maupertuis. Captured by the Austrians, dissed by Voltaire, and even his boss and defender doesn't regard him as top of the intellectual crop. (Then again, Maupertuis suggested vivisections on prisoners, so...)
Your google book link won't work for me and tells me I maxed out my google excerpt time for this month, but:
Elisabeth, first wife of FW2, and the scandal around her arrest: gets mentioned in Lehndorff's diaries a lot, which I did quote from in my original write up of same. Lehndorff does mention - and believe - the rumor of her having planned a coup with her lovers, but I haven't seen anyone non-contemporary believe the "coup" part. (Lehndorff tends to be jump to "Messalina!" conclusions in any Queen + lover scenario pretty easily when he hears gossip about them; there are two other examples after Elisabeth.) One reason why I doubt it myself is that Fritz originally intended to send Elisabeth back to her mother, his sister Charlotte - who refused to take her and completely condemned her -, before life long banishment to Stettin (after the initial few months in Küstrin were over) became his decision. Fritz also put the blame on the entire situation squarely on future FW2's shoulders in his "he neglected her charms, and thus she started to cheat" statement which made it into the biographies I've read and was cited as being in the Histoire de mon Temps. I very much doubt he'd have done that if he'd thought Elisabeth was planning a coup, as opposed to having extramarital sex for its own sake. (Pangels quotes a similar "he neglected her charms" statement from a letter from Fritz to Charlotte, too, as an example of Fritz' generous nature, though of course she does not mention that Fritz' own record re: neglecting the charms of one's wife is, well...)
Elisabeth, btw, outlived everyone else and made sure in her will she would not be buried anywhere near her mother in Braunschweig. She understandably did not forgive Charlotte.
lifelong imprisonment in the Castle of Stettin
I would qualify the term "imprisonment" here. When Lehndorff & his second wife come through Stettin in the mid 1770s, we get this description (which also shows his attitude to Elisabeth has changed from "OMG she totally was the Prussian Messalina and wanted to kill Crown Prince Jr. with her lovers!" to "I feel sorry for her":
With some pity, I see the former Princess of Prussia, who now lives as Princess Elisabeth banished in Stettin. She has the permission to stroll around as she pleases, which she uses amply. (...) The whole distraction the Princess Elisabeth can take is visiting two or three ladies of Stettin society who can hardly be called charming. No gentleman dares to talk to her, other than the fat Duke of Bevern. She dresses in a strange manner, but as she is beautiful, everything suits her well, wherereas the ladies of Stettin who try to imitate her look absurd - two short skirts so one could confuse them with bad ballet dangers, and the heads full of curls so that they look like Medusa from afar. Whereas when I look at the Princess form afar while she strolls down the promenade, she appears like Diana to me. Her pretty little foot is visible, and her legs well above her ankle; she wears a pink corset which suits her beautifully. (...) My wife pays her respect to Princess Elisabeth and returns delighted by her, singing her praises. She claims the Princess is well content, but I can't help but think she must be unhappy.
Later Lehndorff diary entries include rumors that she has started to have affairs again (though these are only rumors he's heard, not personal observations). Ferdinand's daughter, Princess Radziwill, mentions somwewhere visiting Elisabeth and being somewhat at a loss on what to say since Elisabeth was utterly unembarrassed and not sorry at all for anything. A case probably can be made therefore for Stettin, after a while, being firstly exile/banishment rather than imprisonment and later then self chosen place of residence. I could be wrong, and I can't find a citation for it right now, but I think she had the option to leave it later and refused.
Lack of interest in the matter stopping 21st century historians, or is it the archives themselves still?]
At a guess, the former. Given that biographers in the last few decades had no problem getting at the unpublished correspondances between various Hohenzollern siblings (AW with everyone, or the Marwitz letters from the Fritz/Heinrich correspondance which had not been included in any pre WWII editions that I know of). While the scandal around the Elisabeth/FW2 divorce happpened within Fritz' lifetime, it just wasn't of much interest to even deconstructing Fritz biographers, as it had little to do with him (beyond the marriage having been his idea to begin with). And FW2 never got many biographies devoted to himself. There's one more recent mentioned in his German wiki entry, which may delve into Elisabeth as well.
Re: the unpublished AW letters in particular, recent biographers I've seen quoting from them were Ziebura, Oster, Luh; even Jessen has one letter of his to Mina (Princess Heinrich), though without looking those up, I can't tell you where they physically are (Berlin, Trier, Bayreuth?). The website devoted to Wilhelmine's France and Italian journey which I linked at Rheinsberg has his letters to and from Wilhelmine and her husband during that time online.
"There were also women at court who kept diaries. Those that have been handed down to us are from the lady-in-waiting Sophie von Voss and from princess Wilhelmina (“Prinzessin Heinrich”), the wife of Wilhelmina’s uncle Henry of Prussia."
Both get quoted amply by Ziebura in her various Hohenzollern biographies; the former (Sophie von Voss, née von Pannewitz, daughter of the FW puncher, herself object of AW romantic interest, aunt of FW2's morganatic wife Julie) is available in German in print; the same publisher who republished the original Lehndorff diary collection (i.e. the first volume without any of the subsequent ones) previously also had republished hers. This renewed the copyright in Germany, btw, which means no online accessibility for me re: the original editions. Sophie lived long enough to see Napoleon defeated, so her diaries cover many decades of Prussian court life.
Pöllnitz: Lehndorff mentions reading his unpublished memoirs repeatedly during the 1750s. Mind you, he also mentions Pöllnitz (in person, not in writing) at one point admitting he absolutely invents stuff when he feels like it.
Hohenzollern ensorship in general: was heavy, absolutely. As I mentioned elswhere, until 1918, every single historian who'd gotten access to the archives had to submit their subsequent publication for inspection and censorship. Mostly because the narrative as pointed out by Hahn that Preuss first detailed and which justified both Prussian and Hohenzollern rule over Germany.
Re: Keeping Up With the (Censoring) Hohenzollerns
Wait... what? :/ When was this suggestion? My familiarity with Maupertuis only extends to his scientific endeavors (they influence Friedrich's scientific beliefs, which I want to post about at some point when I have more time) and his quarrel with Voltaire.
Re: Google book. My memory is failing me again, because I have read your write-up, but the passages about Elizabeth slipped my mind. Thank you for the write-up. I'd actually discovered the book because I was looking for information concerning the original manuscript of Lehndorff's diary - Giles MacDonogh had written on his blog that "both Trakehnen and Steinort seem to have miraculously survived [the Second World War] in some form, although the latter lost all its contents, even the manuscript of Ernst Ahasverus Lehndorff’s diary" so I guess it was destroyed.
I wish there were English versions, or just digital German versions of Ziebura's works so I could read them. And digital versions of the full Hohenzollern sibling correspondences! Alas, it is not to be.
Re: Keeping Up With the (Censoring) Hohenzollerns
(Re: the destroyed ones, one reason to be very grateful to Schmidt-Lötzens translations, otherwise they'd be lost forever.)
The Lehndorff Family Archive in Leipzig also has the manuscripts from our Lehndorff's ancestor the baroque globetrotter, who named himself Ahasverus and thus burdened his descendants with that name. ;) They look like a real treasure trove, but reading hand written (mostly) French manuscripts is beyond me, I fear...
ETA: re: Maupertuis: see here:
Die Idee des medizinischen Strafvollzugs war dem gebildeten Bürgertum vertraut und basierte auf aristotelischen Theorien, die im Zuge der Rückbesinnung auf die Antike neue Relevanz erhielten. Befürwortet wurde die Vivisektion zum Beispiel von Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, dem Arzt nach dem bezeichnenderweise die Köpfmaschine der französischen Revolution benannt wurde. Auch Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, Präsident der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin, schlug vor, Hinrichtungen durch die Erprobung neuartiger Operationsmethoden und durch Experimente mit Giften und Antidota zu ersetzen und in die Hände der Ärzte zu legen.
Son of ETA: For more about the fate of the Lehndorff diaries, see this 2002 essay, published before there was a reprint (which happened in 2007).
Maupertuis and vivisection
I mean, it's still a terrible idea, and it sounds from the article that even in the 18th C people realized this (although I think it's sort of hilarious that if I'm parsing google translate correctly, a major objection was from people who wanted the corpses for teaching purposes) -- so, yeah, I'll take this as at least partial further evidence that Maupertuis wasn't actually the deepest of thinkers. (I mean, not that deep scientific thinkers are necessarily the deepest ethical thinkers at any time!)
(As I told
Re: Keeping Up With the (Censoring) Hohenzollerns
I knooooooow! I super want to read Ziebura and the full sibling correspondences too! You think she might get her stuff translated if we write to her and tell her there are three of us who are seriously big fans but can't read German and reeeeeeally want an English version? :) (I know, I'm kidding. Mostly.)
You probably have seen mildred's machine translations of the letters at Trier but that's of course super incomplete, sigh.
Re: Keeping Up With the (Censoring) Hohenzollerns
Re: Keeping Up With the (Censoring) Hohenzollerns
Let us discuss this further :)