This is really interesting! And sounds like it would make a fascinating novel, rather more so than actual!FW -- FW sounds like a much more interesting person in the novel than he actually was in real life. I do understand a lot of why FW did the things he did, but... ugh, he was just consistently awful, to the extent that for the first many months you guys would tell me stories and I'd be like "what?? how could he be that awful??" until I just learned to realize that that was the way he was. So it wouldn't be very interesting to read about as a novel, I would think. Of course, some whiplash as well for people who know the history, though...
I really like that idea about Katte as a replacement sacrifice like Isaac -- not as a historical idea, which it clearly wasn't, but as a novelistic idea -- it's sort of something that I could see making a weird twisted sense at the time while being wrong, if that makes any sense, which is also kind of my jam :)
If it were translated into English, it looks interesting enough that I'd probably give it a shot, but I think it will be a long time, if ever, until I could read fluently enough in German for that, and I have other things I'd want to read in German first :)
But I hadn't known that F1's oldest brother was, in fact, called Karl Emil.
Well, to be fair, we did mention to you the FW positives like him being a hardcore worker and reformer. There's a reason between all biographers, no matter their take on him as a person, do praise him as a monarch in terms of what he did for his kingdom (forcible recruiting aside, which ceases to be a plus for post 1945 biographers). It's not that Klepper makes him look better by inventing stuff out of thin air (though he does invent some, like FW being the one to notice Wilhelmine's bruises, for example): that he depicts FW inheriting his broke, overtaxed kingdom and poor people and turning it into a prosperous one with its own industries, with (male) school attendance now a obligatory for all children (and with the schools to go with that), with midwives getting professional training and financial reward, and with the Berlin Charité, still today probably the most famous and one of the largest German hospitals, getting founded and supported - that's all true. And devoting as much page time to this side of FW as Klepper does would have even if he hadn't simultanously mitigated the abusive side of FW where he could made FW look better than he does when you discuss him in the context of his family almost exclusively.
(Fritz praising his father in the "History of the House of Brandenburg" is really not just Stockholm syndrom and "thanks for the army, Dad".)
But at the same time, like I said above, stuff like Gundling and Doris Ritter requires considerable editorializing and white washing before they fit with Klepper's FW whose strictness turning into abuse for his eldest is an aberration, not the norm, and who of course is no one SD would have had to fear. BTW, this isn't a view limited to Klepper's novel. It's there with biographers to this day, and I'm always throwing up my hands and saying: look, he could have at any time done to her what her father did to her mother, and she knew it. He also could have physically beaten her to death. Yes, he was invested in the idea of himself as a loving husband, but of all the things to hold against SD, that she didn't love him back is not one, and I 100% believe her about being afraid. You can do that while still thinking she was an awful mother on her own terms. (And that precisely because she was afraid of FW, her dissing Wilhelmine to him in order to punish Wihelmine for the Bayreuth marriage was extra awful.)
Incidentally, Klepper's own take on the predestination subject in the context of 1729 - 1731 is:
Katte pre escape: flirts with predestination as a fashionable intellectual subject, but more to philosophize about with Fritz, who knows it's something Dad is against and hence talks about, but isn't seriously interested in beyond that
November 1730: Happens.
Fritz post Katte's death: Okay, Dad. Fuck you. Now it's on! Predestination talk all the time, to avenge Katte!
FW: I think God is punishing me. Each of these letters from Küstrin is torment. When my son stops with the predestination talk, it'll be a sign God forgives me.
August 1731 reconciliation: Happens. (The submission scene as per Grumbkow's protocol but significantly missing the entire "here's what I'd have done if you'd have succeeded in your escape!" passage.)
FW: I think God has forgiven me. I have hope for my son again. Now to get him a good wife and queen!
That's true! But FW was just so awful to his family (and anyone who got in his way, really, like Gundling and Doris Ritter) that... ugh. I like Klepper's FW better :P Though again I wish it hadn't come at the expense of SD.
(The submission scene as per Grumbkow's protocol but significantly missing the entire "here's what I'd have done if you'd have succeeded in your escape!" passage.)
*nods* That would really not have fit. I do wonder whether he realized he was taking these liberties. Because if he did realize, then I'm totally happy about that. But as you pointed out, other biographers seem to often leave out a lot too...
To quote AnhaltSophie: "He certainly possessed great attributes as a King, but he had nothing in him that could be loved, neither in his personal nor in his public life."
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timeasmymeasure
Re: Der Vater Revisited - II
Date: 2020-05-25 04:53 am (UTC)I really like that idea about Katte as a replacement sacrifice like Isaac -- not as a historical idea, which it clearly wasn't, but as a novelistic idea -- it's sort of something that I could see making a weird twisted sense at the time while being wrong, if that makes any sense, which is also kind of my jam :)
If it were translated into English, it looks interesting enough that I'd probably give it a shot, but I think it will be a long time, if ever, until I could read fluently enough in German for that, and I have other things I'd want to read in German first :)
But I hadn't known that F1's oldest brother was, in fact, called Karl Emil.
Oh! That makes perfect sense now :)
Re: Der Vater Revisited - II
Date: 2020-05-25 07:23 am (UTC)(Fritz praising his father in the "History of the House of Brandenburg" is really not just Stockholm syndrom and "thanks for the army, Dad".)
But at the same time, like I said above, stuff like Gundling and Doris Ritter requires considerable editorializing and white washing before they fit with Klepper's FW whose strictness turning into abuse for his eldest is an aberration, not the norm, and who of course is no one SD would have had to fear. BTW, this isn't a view limited to Klepper's novel. It's there with biographers to this day, and I'm always throwing up my hands and saying: look, he could have at any time done to her what her father did to her mother, and she knew it. He also could have physically beaten her to death. Yes, he was invested in the idea of himself as a loving husband, but of all the things to hold against SD, that she didn't love him back is not one, and I 100% believe her about being afraid. You can do that while still thinking she was an awful mother on her own terms. (And that precisely because she was afraid of FW, her dissing Wilhelmine to him in order to punish Wihelmine for the Bayreuth marriage was extra awful.)
Incidentally, Klepper's own take on the predestination subject in the context of 1729 - 1731 is:
Katte pre escape: flirts with predestination as a fashionable intellectual subject, but more to philosophize about with Fritz, who knows it's something Dad is against and hence talks about, but isn't seriously interested in beyond that
November 1730: Happens.
Fritz post Katte's death: Okay, Dad. Fuck you. Now it's on! Predestination talk all the time, to avenge Katte!
FW: I think God is punishing me. Each of these letters from Küstrin is torment. When my son stops with the predestination talk, it'll be a sign God forgives me.
August 1731 reconciliation: Happens. (The submission scene as per Grumbkow's protocol but significantly missing the entire "here's what I'd have done if you'd have succeeded in your escape!" passage.)
FW: I think God has forgiven me. I have hope for my son again. Now to get him a good wife and queen!
Re: Der Vater Revisited - II
Date: 2020-05-27 05:09 am (UTC)(The submission scene as per Grumbkow's protocol but significantly missing the entire "here's what I'd have done if you'd have succeeded in your escape!" passage.)
*nods* That would really not have fit. I do wonder whether he realized he was taking these liberties. Because if he did realize, then I'm totally happy about that. But as you pointed out, other biographers seem to often leave out a lot too...
Re: Der Vater Revisited - II
Date: 2020-05-28 12:00 am (UTC)To quote AnhaltSophie: "He certainly possessed great attributes as a King, but he had nothing in him that could be loved, neither in his personal nor in his public life."
Re: Der Vater Revisited - II
Date: 2020-05-29 03:22 am (UTC)