Read 20 pages, through the end of chapter 4. AW is a fratboy but loyal (if somewhat naive) brother. I guess when everyone likes you, you give people the benefit of the doubt until they repeatedly and publicly do their level best to crush you.
* Fritz is beginning the military humiliation of AW already, AW actually submits this time and Fritz acts all benevolently forgiving but fools no one. I can see why 1) Fritz expected him to do it again a few years later, and 2) AW refused to.
* Fritz: "I don't owe anyone an accounting of my decisions."
Peter Keith, in "Lovers": "I wish he would talk to me, instead of handing down judgments on stone tablets from Mount Sinai. I know he's made a point of never explaining himself since he became king, but..."
:/
* Fritz: When my siblings marry into HRE principalities, that makes them part of Prussia and subject to me, right? That's how it works? I'm pretty sure that's how it works.
* Wilhelmine writes to Fritz that she married in order to get him out of Küstrin. Previously, the only place I'd seen this claim was in her memoirs. Now, since she married in November and he wasn't released until February, after *he'd* agreed to marry, I've always wondered what was up with that. In my Christmas '32 fic, I went with "FW lied." This seems entirely consistent with, "Fritz, have some boundaries with your sister. Wilhelmine, I have no idea why he's being so cold toward you, but if it's because he's afraid of me, I'm extremely offended. It's like he doesn't trust me or something!"
But...is there any documentary evidence that FW told her he'd let Fritz out if she married? Or that it did indeed influence his decision?
* OMG, Fritz is withholding money from Sonsine now? I like Sonsine! *frowny face*
* Aww, the most beautiful skeleton in Europe. I remember that. It's touching and sad at the same time.
* Ahh, Amalie and Ulrike would rather have been boys. I bet! Enforced gender roles suck. :/
* Spoiler request: is Ulrike going to stay happy with her marriage?
* Der Bankier habe seinem Sekretär erzählt, dass man mit der Annahme von Juwelen als Pfand sehr vorsichtig geworden sei, seitdem der Vater des russischen Thronfolges die Bank betrogen hätte, indem sich erst bei näherer Prüfung herausgestellt hatte, dass ein Teil der Steine falsch waren.
Help me out with the German here? Because once upon a time, you told us that Ulrike's jewels were found to be fake, but if I were encountering this sentence without having been told that, I would have concluded that the banker explained to the secretary that the bank had become very cautious about accepting jewelry as collateral, ever since the time the father of the Russian heir to the throne (future Prussian Pete's late father, the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp and one-time claimant to the Swedish throne) had swindled the bank, in that on closer inspection, part of his jewels turned out to be fake.
But this is saying that part of *Ulrike's* jewels are fake? I read through the rest of the chapter to see if there was a different passage that referred to her jewels being fake, but I didn't find anything. Or does this say what I think it says, but you got the part about Ulrike's jewels being fake from somewhere else?
* AW: I learned two things from my brother. One, the ruler being the first servant of the state is the way to go. Two, unrestricted power with no accountability is not.
* "my brother" means AW, and "the King" is Fritz (who previously was "my brother" throughout). You bet that sentence was written at the height of the quarrel.
Ziebura seems to think that sentence reflects Wilhelmine's feelings at the time: that like a seismograph (a Fritzmograph?), she had already picked up on the first signs of Fritz isolating himself and driving everyone else away. But the evidence Ziebura gives is largely from the memoirs, which were written during the quarrel, and also Wilhelmine's "But why don't you write me more?!" letters from before that, when she's worried about him dying during the war.
* Oh, cahn, I noticed partway through today's reading (latter part of chapter IV) that the OCR was doing a really bad job of recognizing spaces and was smushing words together. (I mean, even for German, where smushing words together is the order of the day. :P) Is this affecting the quality of your translation? If so, I can manually insert some spaces and reprocess it. But sometimes Google is surprisingly smart about mistakes.
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Re: AW readthrough
Date: 2020-09-02 03:00 am (UTC)Read 20 pages, through the end of chapter 4. AW is a fratboy but loyal (if somewhat naive) brother. I guess when everyone likes you, you give people the benefit of the doubt
until they repeatedly and publicly do their level best to crush you.* Fritz is beginning the military humiliation of AW already, AW actually submits this time and Fritz acts all benevolently forgiving but fools no one. I can see why 1) Fritz expected him to do it again a few years later, and 2) AW refused to.
* Fritz: "I don't owe anyone an accounting of my decisions."
Peter Keith, in "Lovers": "I wish he would talk to me, instead of handing down judgments on stone tablets from Mount Sinai. I know he's made a point of never explaining himself since he became king, but..."
:/
* Fritz: When my siblings marry into HRE principalities, that makes them part of Prussia and subject to me, right? That's how it works? I'm pretty sure that's how it works.
* Wilhelmine writes to Fritz that she married in order to get him out of Küstrin. Previously, the only place I'd seen this claim was in her memoirs. Now, since she married in November and he wasn't released until February, after *he'd* agreed to marry, I've always wondered what was up with that. In my Christmas '32 fic, I went with "FW lied." This seems entirely consistent with, "Fritz, have some boundaries with your sister. Wilhelmine, I have no idea why he's being so cold toward you, but if it's because he's afraid of me, I'm extremely offended. It's like he doesn't trust me or something!"
But...is there any documentary evidence that FW told her he'd let Fritz out if she married? Or that it did indeed influence his decision?
* OMG, Fritz is withholding money from Sonsine now? I like Sonsine! *frowny face*
* Aww, the most beautiful skeleton in Europe. I remember that. It's touching and sad at the same time.
* Ahh, Amalie and Ulrike would rather have been boys. I bet! Enforced gender roles suck. :/
* Spoiler request: is Ulrike going to stay happy with her marriage?
* Der Bankier habe seinem Sekretär erzählt, dass man mit der Annahme von Juwelen als Pfand sehr vorsichtig geworden sei, seitdem der Vater des russischen Thronfolges die Bank betrogen hätte, indem sich erst bei näherer Prüfung herausgestellt hatte, dass ein Teil der Steine falsch waren.
Help me out with the German here? Because once upon a time, you told us that Ulrike's jewels were found to be fake, but if I were encountering this sentence without having been told that, I would have concluded that the banker explained to the secretary that the bank had become very cautious about accepting jewelry as collateral, ever since the time the father of the Russian heir to the throne (future Prussian Pete's late father, the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp and one-time claimant to the Swedish throne) had swindled the bank, in that on closer inspection, part of his jewels turned out to be fake.
But this is saying that part of *Ulrike's* jewels are fake? I read through the rest of the chapter to see if there was a different passage that referred to her jewels being fake, but I didn't find anything. Or does this say what I think it says, but you got the part about Ulrike's jewels being fake from somewhere else?
* AW: I learned two things from my brother. One, the ruler being the first servant of the state is the way to go. Two, unrestricted power with no accountability is not.
* "my brother" means AW, and "the King" is Fritz (who previously was "my brother" throughout). You bet that sentence was written at the height of the quarrel.
Ziebura seems to think that sentence reflects Wilhelmine's feelings at the time: that like a seismograph (a Fritzmograph?), she had already picked up on the first signs of Fritz isolating himself and driving everyone else away. But the evidence Ziebura gives is largely from the memoirs, which were written during the quarrel, and also Wilhelmine's "But why don't you write me more?!" letters from before that, when she's worried about him dying during the war.
* Oh,