As usual, a small fraction of what I wanted to talk about, but here goes:
* I meant to say a while back, that Heinrich obviously isn't worried about his mail to Ferdinand being read by spies. !!
* Heinrich plans his trips like he plans his campaigns! Very, very cautiously and deviously. "I won't tell Fritz I want to go to St. Petersburg/Paris, I'll just go most of the way there, get an invitation from the monarch, and then ask for permission for what's juuuust short of being a fait accompli." It's what a former boss of mine calls the "foot in door" approach to negotiation: get what you want in small increments that the other person can agree to, instead of getting a flat no from asking for the whole thing up front. And I totally see why that works with Fritz.
Also, Heinrich is made of patience when it comes to political and military affairs, and Fritz only rarely has a concept of patience. Switch their birth order, and I suspect that distribution of patience inverts. The power differential makes a big difference, as does the fact that Fritz got targeted by the hardest abuse the youngest.
* Heinrich saying that in other countries, good service is rewarded, but here, you're lucky just to be left alone (i.e., "At least he hasn't pulled an AW on me yet"), coming one paragraph after Ziebura says he's been hanging out with Thiébault...is this where Thiébault got the idea that the only thing Fritz ever did for the Kattes was not persecute them?
Oh, wow, I just checked my writeup, and I wrote, I did find Thiebault claiming that the Katte family got *no* favor from Fritz, Heinrich was the only one who would employ any of them, and all they ever got from Fritz was not being persecuted.
Huh. I wonder if Heinrich is outright stating that Fritz never did anything for the Kattes, or if he's merely employing a Katte (which one?! in which role?! enquiring minds want to know) and complaining about his own lack of reward, and Thiébault is conflating the two. The latter seems more likely, but it's possible Heinrich wasn't entirely fair to Fritz.
Anyway, I think we have our source for that claim now.
* When Fritz says "A god, my dear brother, has given you this brilliant plan," he's being very classical. The Greeks (at least in Homer, I can't state this categorically about other places and times), did *not* specify "Zeus must have caused this" if they had no idea who it was. Because if they guessed the wrong god, the actual god might be offended. So when they wanted to attribute something to divine intervention, they say "a god." This is easy to miss, because the narrator, Homer, will compose stories in which specific gods do this or that, but the *characters* won't speculate about which god must have done something if they don't know.
I, um, may know this because I was reading Homeric scholarship while writing a fic many years ago, and had to go and replace a speculation about a specific god with "some god."
Re: Heinrich readthrough!
* I meant to say a while back, that Heinrich obviously isn't worried about his mail to Ferdinand being read by spies. !!
* Heinrich plans his trips like he plans his campaigns! Very, very cautiously and deviously. "I won't tell Fritz I want to go to St. Petersburg/Paris, I'll just go most of the way there, get an invitation from the monarch, and then ask for permission for what's juuuust short of being a fait accompli." It's what a former boss of mine calls the "foot in door" approach to negotiation: get what you want in small increments that the other person can agree to, instead of getting a flat no from asking for the whole thing up front. And I totally see why that works with Fritz.
Also, Heinrich is made of patience when it comes to political and military affairs, and Fritz only rarely has a concept of patience. Switch their birth order, and I suspect that distribution of patience inverts. The power differential makes a big difference, as does the fact that Fritz got targeted by the hardest abuse the youngest.
* Heinrich saying that in other countries, good service is rewarded, but here, you're lucky just to be left alone (i.e., "At least he hasn't pulled an AW on me yet"), coming one paragraph after Ziebura says he's been hanging out with Thiébault...is this where Thiébault got the idea that the only thing Fritz ever did for the Kattes was not persecute them?
Oh, wow, I just checked my writeup, and I wrote, I did find Thiebault claiming that the Katte family got *no* favor from Fritz, Heinrich was the only one who would employ any of them, and all they ever got from Fritz was not being persecuted.
Huh. I wonder if Heinrich is outright stating that Fritz never did anything for the Kattes, or if he's merely employing a Katte (which one?! in which role?! enquiring minds want to know) and complaining about his own lack of reward, and Thiébault is conflating the two. The latter seems more likely, but it's possible Heinrich wasn't entirely fair to Fritz.
Anyway, I think we have our source for that claim now.
* When Fritz says "A god, my dear brother, has given you this brilliant plan," he's being very classical. The Greeks (at least in Homer, I can't state this categorically about other places and times), did *not* specify "Zeus must have caused this" if they had no idea who it was. Because if they guessed the wrong god, the actual god might be offended. So when they wanted to attribute something to divine intervention, they say "a god." This is easy to miss, because the narrator, Homer, will compose stories in which specific gods do this or that, but the *characters* won't speculate about which god must have done something if they don't know.
I, um, may know this because I was reading Homeric scholarship while writing a fic many years ago, and had to go and replace a speculation about a specific god with "some god."