I spent all my free time today reading German, after not reading much in the past few days. and got through the first 52 pages! That's up through "A conflict is looming." Definitely easier reading than the Wilhelmine memoirs. I'm thinking of reading this book first, then picking up volume 2 of the memoirs.
No comments tonight, as it's my bedtime, and also cahn could use some time to catch up. ;)
Good luck with the Enlightenment nominations, guys! Sorry I'm not more help, but, you know, German and sleep. #priorities But I'm following the developments and silently cheering you on.
50 pages of Oster again, hoping to leave comments and update the chronology this weekend.
(What's more impressive is that I read those 50 pages between 4:30 and 9 pm, meaning much faster than ever before. I could have done more, but I didn't want to burn out.)
Wilhelmine and SD are at the ball and have just learned that Fritz tried to escape.
Currently we're at "Circle of Voltaire RPF", though I still think it's silly that past Yuletides in the last two years signed off on "19th Century German Literature RPF" (which in theory would have encompassed anyone from E.T.A. Hoffmann to Thomas Mann, who did start to publish before the century ended), and "19th Century British Writers RPF" (ditto, and did include Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll as well as Byron and the Shelleys), i.e. an enormous amount of time, and a cast of thousands who don't have anything in common but geography, but "Enlightenment Writers and Scientists" is too broad. Ah well.
Hmph! Yeah, I agree with you :D But Circle of Voltaire will work for our purposes... and seems like the natural title, especially given the nomination of Madame Denis :)
Kind of a moot point now, but would "Natural Philosophers" have fit the bill? I suppose Hervey not so much, but you might be able to make a slant case for Lady Mary given the inoculation stuff... But Circle of Voltaire is nice because we don't have to make a case for every single character being a natural philosopher, which I think we could do but would get tiresome.
...and now that I've read your defense, I think I should just co-opt that for the promo post! Because I think that should get anyone interested in this set of characters :)
I still think it's silly that past Yuletides in the last two years signed off on "19th Century German Literature RPF" (which in theory would have encompassed anyone from E.T.A. Hoffmann to Thomas Mann, who did start to publish before the century ended), and "19th Century British Writers RPF" (ditto, and did include Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll as well as Byron and the Shelleys), i.e. an enormous amount of time, and a cast of thousands who don't have anything in common but geography, but "Enlightenment Writers and Scientists" is too broad.
I'm not going to pick a fight in the Yuletide admin community, but let's not forget "Historical Royals and Their Favourites RPF", which the mods and a couple of us, myself included, arrived at after much discussion, for which the nominated characters included Alexander the Great (4th century BCE Macedon) and James VI and I (17th century CE Great Britain). 2000 years and an entire continent, and we went with a gender-neutral "royals" specifically to make sure women like Anne could get included if needed. I mean, we could have included Catherine and Poniatowksi for 18th century Russia! Gilgamesh and Enkidu, probably. :P
But all right, Circle of Voltaire it is. :D
Algarotti: *I'm* the one who's six degrees from everyone who even slightly overlaps the 1700-1799 period! Voltaire: Nobody knows who you are. Even in the salon, nobody had heard of you before last year. Algarotti: :(
* Oster confirms that Fritz's only baptismal name was Friedrich. Der Einzige! "This name has been luck-bringing to my house. Hopefully this baby is as fortunate/happy as his ancestors."
Oster: Well, Fritz won't be *happy*, exactly...
Me: :-(
* So remember when we discussed how Wilhelmine resented her first two brothers (named Fritz) and our Fritz was the first one she showed affection to? And cahn, the only one of us with parental experience ;), says that 2 1/2 years is about right for a kid to start thinking babies are cute?
Well, Oster reports the following:
1707, November 23, 1707: Bb!Fritz1 born. Barely six months later: Bb!Fritz1 dies. The internet gives me May 13, 1708. 1709, July 3: Wilhelmine born. 1710, August 16: Bb!Fritz2 born. 1711, July 31: Bb!Fritz2 dies. 1712, January 24: Bb!Fritz3 born. 1712, February 8: Grandpa F1 writes in a letter, "sie ihre zwei ersten Brüder nicht leiden konnte"--she couldn't stand her first two brothers.
What's wrong with this picture?
The first of the two brothers in question died before she was born!
What's up with that, F1? I can believe that she didn't like the one that was born when she was one and died when she was two, especially since he got all the attention that she didn't, but she's being falsely accused of things that happened before she was born!
I wonder if F1's having a memory lapse here, or if something else is going on.
* The bit about FW being impressed by Dutch burgher values, like cleanliness and orderliness, is relevant to why the servant book I read is specifically about servants in *France* during the period. The author makes the point that French upper class values were about conspicuous consumption, so servants did a lot of standing around in livery looking handsome and making you look wealthy, and very little attention in "how to run your household" manuals was devoted to things like making sure servants dusted and kept the fire going. So there was gold and marble and filth everywhere, and the living space was uncomfortable to live in but very eye-catching. French travelers who went to England or the Netherlands were amazed at how clean and comfortable the houses were, and the servants were actually supposed to take scrubbing the floors and such seriously.
* Heinrich Rüdiger von Ilgen: I'm recognizing more and more obscure names! This is the father of Baroness von Knyphausen, Ariane's mother, who receives that box from Fritz in the opening scene of "Lovers lying two and two."
Knyphausen, the minister who's pro-English marriage and eventually loses his job over it, is, as I said in the Wilhelmine memoir write-up recently, Ariane's father.
* Google wasn't able to translate "Knirps", as in "König Knirps", Wilhelmine and Fritz's not-so-respectful nickname for Dad, but when I put it in the browser, I got "midget, squirt, little fellow." Lol! The little fellow and his long fellows.
* Loved Oster pointing out what I had noticed when rereading the memoirs: evil governess Leti's introduction was all about how she was Italian, from no family to speak of, and had an unprestigious job correcting newspaper prints, whereas wonderful Sonsine's introduction is all about how noble her family was and how her ancestors distinguished themselves with all the services they performed. !!!
Lehndorff, who's not exactly not a snob himself: This Wilhelmine is a bit hung up on class.
This is why I put in two of the things that selenak noticed in "With You, There's a Heaven": Wilhelmine not seeing Fredersdorf as a person but as an extension of her brother, and Fritz being afraid to admit that he's falling in love with a commoner. I threw in the line about Fritz remembering Wilhelmine accusing "even a von Katte" of not knowing his place, with the intention of conveying that this isn't her real (or at least her biggest) objection, but it's one she can admit to, unlike "But what about meeeee?!", and that Wilhelmine (along with SD, and society in general), was a formative influence on Fritz and his own classism.
Also, the servants book has a good section on the tension between servants and families that resulted in the cycle of abuse: badly treated servants were more likely to treat their masters' children badly. Including: total neglect, meaning wealthy kids were sometimes half-starved; sexual abuse: the older men in the house molest the maidservants, who molest the boys, who grow up with a fucked up attitude toward sex and proceed to molest their own servants.
As the century went on and middle-class family-and-home values started to percolate upwards in France, the thrust of moralizing works directed at servants charged with caring for children went in a little over a hundred years from "You are responsible before God for every child who dies as a result of your action or inaction," to, "It's probably not healthy to give kids everything they want all the time. Tell them no once in a while?"
* Oster doesn't think FW's kids went hungry, because Seckendorff didn't report inadequate portions. He thinks FW's tastes in food weren't to the liking of SD, who taught her kids to despise it. While I'm absolutely sure this happened, I'm not convinced the kids never went hungry, or that they didn't learn to associate it with their father.
Fritz's weight at Dresden, combined with his height, tell me he wasn't underweight at 16. But even if FW was starving the kids every chance he got (and I suspect it was more like small portion sizes than actual starvation), SD was apparently smuggling them food (I think this was in Lavisse?) *and* FW was away a lot. So it's quite possible that FW was frugal in terms of portion sizes and the kids got compensation later.
But that's not evidence that he *was*, just that he could have been.
The two additional pieces of evidence I have beyond Wilhelmine's memoirs are these:
Fritz writing a letter to Grumbkow (?) at Küstrin, saying he preferred to starve there than at Potsdam. Now, this is not when he's being his most fair to FW, and could be part of the SD "this is not acceptable food" rhetoric, but...
Ziebura says *AW* later said he and the other kids were often half-starved as kids. If Wilhelmine, Fritz, *and* AW all agree on something about FW...maybe they're not making it up. Now, I haven't seen the context, or even a direct quote, for that claim, but I'm keeping it as supporting evidence until I do.
What's up with that, F1? I can believe that she didn't like the one that was born when she was one and died when she was two, especially since he got all the attention that she didn't, but she's being falsely accused of things that happened before she was born!
I wonder if F1's having a memory lapse here, or if something else is going on.
It probably was a memory lapse. My other guess would be projection, but projection of what? The baby Sophie Charlotte had before FW, one Friedrich August, died before FW was born, and she never had any more children. As for F1's own childhood, he was son no.3 himself, with two brothers ahead of him, one of whom died before F1 was born. (The other - Karl Emil! - was one of those he later suspected his stepmother of killing, along with his younger brother Ludwig. Two more (fullL) siblings died as babies. Then came stepmom and all the Schwedt half siblings.
"Knirps" is a bit old fashioned but still in use today, though mostly used for little children.
Wilhelmine the snob: oh, absolutely. Mind you, I suspect this tendency in her was strengthened via the awareness the Hohenzollern were considered as upstarts (what with the very recent kingly title) by the rest of Europe, and of course SD had it drummed into her that she was meant for higher things and FW was completely undignified and no one was to follow his example from the get go. I could also see child Wilhelmine extra internalizing class bias precisely because of Leti, i.e. this woman had been given power over her and abused her, and she clung to her self confidence by telling herself "I'm still better than you, Italian lowlife!"
Which, btw, leads into what you say about servants and the chains of abuse and neglect. Governesses also had this weird in between status - not really part of the servants, but also not really on a level with the family that gets talked about a lot in any book about the Brontes. Presumably Leti had had her own experiences, too. (And as Oster points out at the very least must have been well educated, because she did give Wilhelmine a first class education in terms of knowledge, see also the difference between child Wilhemine's letters to child AW's letters to FW in style and maturity.)
I'm also reminded that Byron (the poet) was sexually abused by a nurse when he was ten or eleven. She was also a strict Calvinist who altered between punishing him, groping him and quoting the bible at him. It's not surprising adult Byron didn't care much for religion, and scandalized the country.
I can't believe we're a third of the way through this book and we're still negotiating her marriage, zomg.
* The Hannovers (Guelphs) had to make permission to visit Hannover one of their conditions for accepting the throne of GB. This is ringing a bell, but I'd forgotten that. I can see why it became a point of contention.
* In 1724/1725, the Magdeburgers brought some sort of lawsuit against FW at the Imperial Court? Do you know anything more about this, selenak?
* Lol, so we already knew Seckendorff sometimes couldn't write reports the next morning because of the insane hangover from keeping up with FW the night before, and we knew he used to suck on an empty pipe at the tobacco parliament, but it was entertaining reading Oster's write-up of how "the staunch non-smoker got permission to put an empty pipe in his mouth for form's sake," and how periodically Seckendorff had to go take the waters to recover a little from the hardcore job of being the most successful envoy at FW's court. This is why I maintain that if FW had wanted sex, Seckendorff would have done whatever it took to advance the cause of Seckendorff.
Also, he lived to be 90, so I guess the lifestyle didn't ruin his health *too* much. :P
* Another minor character: Adrian Bernhard von Borcke is the father of FW2 educator Borcke.
* In July 1728, French Count Rottembourg says he has reason to believe Fritz will try running away. Now, my sources all say that he was recalled from Prussia in 1727 and stationed in Spain. So either he has contacts that are keeping him up to date, or Fritz was talking about running away even before that, or both.
* Speaking of running away...remember how on January 21, 1730 Peter got sent to Wesel and Fritz's governors got strict instructions to sleep with him every single night? And Koser said that the governor order was because FW feared Fritz trying to escape?
This is the first time I've seen evidence for that (as opposed to other types of nocturnal shenanigans) being the reason: on January 31, Oster says FW returns to Berlin, where all the envoys write reports expressing their surprise at how he's letting Fritz off with a mild scolding, in light of a recent anonymous letter FW received warning him that Fritz has escape plans. Proposed envoy reasons for this uncharacteristic behavior:
- This milder treatment is only apparent, not real. - FW's trying the carrot instead of the stick. - FW's trying to keep Fritz from encouraging Wilhelmine in her resistance to her prospective bridegrooms.
No dice on the last one, says Oster: Fritz is willing to suffer anything if it keeps Wilhelmine out of a miserable marriage! Oster will later quote the letter from Fritz to Wilhelmine saying, "Don't get married just to get me out of prison, I mean it."
Aaaand, Oster cites Fritz writing in 1730 to the Margrave of Schwedt that if he marries Wilhelmine, he'll "regret it sooner or later," the implication being when Fritz becomes king. This would fit well in a Mafia AU, along with "You know who we should kidnap, Heinrich?" :P
Poor younger sister Sophia Dorothea. :/
* SD trying to forestall a marriage she doesn't want by arguing that Wilhelmine's too young and will reproach her parents someday if she ends up unhappily married...that's pretty brazen, considering the quote at the beginning of the book where SD is writing about two-year-old FoW asking about his future bride, aka TWO-MONTH-OLD Wilhelmine.
* I like the way Oster analyzes "But did event X in Wilhelmine's memoirs *really* happen?" every so often I've been wondering what's backed up with documentary evidence and what isn't.
1) FW wanting to marry her to August the Strong: probably not, says Oster, no external evidence, and surely SD would freak out.
2) August the Strong trying to get Wilhelmine married to Weißenfels: definitely not, says Oster.
I was not aware that Weißenfels was a possible rival to the Saxon electorate due to religion, and that this might lie behind FW's interest in getting Wilhelmine married to him. That was interesting!
3) August letting his son decide he didn't want to marry Wilhelmine: seems unlikely, says Oster.
I mean, I'm sure there would have been pressure, but not everyone is FW? Even Wilhelmine got to turn down a couple candidates (at a high price) before accepting one under duress. I'm neutral on this point, pending further evidence...
* When Ferdinand was born and SD was bedridden, FW showed favor to Wilhelmine by letting her look after 4-yo Heinrich...who at the time was his favorite? What about AW?
Friedrich Wilhelms gute Laune ging an diesem Tag sogar so weit, daß er Wilhelmine auftrug, während Sophie Dorothea im Wochen bett lag, für ihren Bruder Heinrich zu sorgen, der damals sein Liebling war.
* Huh. So I did remember that the idea of Fritz becoming governor in Hannover until FW died was proposed as part of the marriage deal, but Oster adds that the British agreed to this, only instead of giving the governorship to Fritz, they would give it to A WOMAN Amelia!
I take back what I said long ago about this marriage going better than the EC marriage.
Fritz: Franz Stephan, I am not. I'm also an expert in marital warfare even at this tender age. Bring it on.
* Also! G2 says that due to their youth, Fritz and Amelia would live in England at first. So I'm wrong, we *don't* need a successful escape AU in order to get Fritz at the British court while G2 and Caroline are accusing Wilhelmine of faking her pregnancy and FoW is trying to get her into a carriage to St. James in the presence of the brother who's perfectly willing to threaten her prospective husbands with vague but dire future consequences.
I wouldn't wish such a fate on Wilhelmine, but wooow, can you imagine Lord Hervey recording how this went down??
* Speaking of not wishing things on Wilhelmine, Oster says Melusine expressed pity for Wilhelmine as the future wife of FoW. I suppose our speculation about her being on good terms with FoW (politically, if nothing else) wouldn't rule out realizing he's not great husband material.
cahn, remember that any time you see the Duchess of Kendal, that's Katte's "aunt" Melusine, mistress of G1.
(I still can't believe that one lecturer thought she was a fictional character inspired by a Fontane novel; my copy of Zeithain has a Personenregister listing who everyone is and their dates, and she's in there!
EHRENGARD MELUSINE VON DER SCHULENBURG, Herzogin von Kendal (ab 1719), * 25.12.1667 in Emden; † 10.5.1743 in Kendal House, Isleworth bei Brentford, Mätresse von Georg I., König von England)
* Oster trusts Catt, sigh. Thanks be that you read prefaces, selenak. Otherwise, *I* would still trust Catt!
At a guess, Oster trusting Catt is your explanation for four years old Heinrich being declared FW's fave by him; Catt, remember, claims he was. Now of course I'm prepared to be wrong and to have missed something/misremember, but I don't recall that babysitting story during SD's labor from Wilhelmine's memoirs, and a quick cursory check on my kindle copy doesn't give me that story. With your recent far more thorough reading of the year 1730 in her memoirs, do you recall anything like it? So unless Oster provides a different source citation for the anecdote - say, an ambassadorial report (by Guy Dickens or Hotham the older, presumably), I'm going with my "faith in Catt strikes again" guess.
At any event: why would Wilhelmine need to supervise Heinrich during SD's labor and ensueing lying-in anyway? That's what the staff is for. Heinrich having joined AW's household as of his fourth birthday in January, he wasn't even staying with his mother's household anymore. Note that in the letters from eight years old AW to FW which Cahn could read, which describe what the boys do all day, there's no mention of Mom or their oldest sister anywhere, just of Heinrich and their tutors.
Magdeburgers: would have to look it up.
SD trying to forestall a marriage she doesn't want by arguing that Wilhelmine's too young and will reproach her parents someday if she ends up unhappily married...that's pretty brazen, considering the quote at the beginning of the book where SD is writing about two-year-old FoW asking about his future bride, aka TWO-MONTH-OLD Wilhelmine.
No kidding. It really shows how soon she got fixated on that idea.
FW wanting to marry her to August the Strong: probably not, says Oster, no external evidence, and surely SD would freak out.
On the one hand, yes, on the other there's the Fritz letter from Dresden to Wilhelmine which gives her a "hot or not?" report on August the Strong. Now maybe it's just because Fritz assumes his sister would want to know more about their host, but date wise, it works with when the memoirs say the match was talked about, i.e. between FW's short lived "am gonna abdicate and live the true Christian life with my wife and daughters at Wusterhausen" idea and the Dresden visit. Maybe it wasn't as serious a possibility as she presents it in her memoirs, but what I do think is possible that Grumbkow, who was after all the FW/August liason, put it out there in some drunken rounds, and FW didn't immediately say no, which would have been enough for rumors to start and filter through to Wilhelmine and Fritz.
I take back what I said long ago about this marriage going better than the EC marriage.
Fritz: Franz Stephan, I am not. I'm also an expert in marital warfare even at this tender age. Bring it on.
LOL. And Amelia/Emily comes across as way more strong willed than EC, too. Mind you, her own experience with royal marriage would have been with Caroline managing G2 by pretending to worship to the ground he tread on but manipulating him into accepting all her ideas as his.
I wouldn't wish such a fate on Wilhelmine, but wooow, can you imagine Lord Hervey recording how this went down??
Quite. And Fritz of Prussia would have done him the favor of always talking in French when insulting the Hannover clan, too.
In 1724/1725, the Magdeburgers brought some sort of lawsuit against FW at the Imperial Court?
I was busy looking into this, and I still haven't found it, but what I did find was very interesting.
Brandenburg had possessed the expectation of certain limited rights in Limpurg since 1693...When the last count died in August 1713 without male heirs, Brandenburg-Prussia occupied the territory. This prompted the widowed countess to appeal to the Reichshofrat to secure the continued autonomous existence of the county. The Reichshofrat subsequently sent the Emperor a report, which related that 'Prussia invaded the Limpurg lands with a whole battalion, and even failed to spare the widowed countess’s castle from being occupied by soldiers.'
Citation: "Imperial law versus geopolitical interest: the Reichshofrat and the protection of smaller states in the Holy Roman Empire under Charles VI (1711-40)", Patrick Milton, a heavily footnoted academic paper from 2015 with primary source citations (including envoy reports), available here.
The difference being that FW recognized imperial authority and grudgingly backed down when the Reichshofrat told him to. I guess he *didn't* start a war of aggression over it.
But yeeeeeah. Between this and FW's decision to go to war to get Swedish Pomerania in 1715, I'm at least half side-eyeing that political testament.
ETA: This table looks so much better in preview. Sigh.
how periodically Seckendorff had to go take the waters to recover a little from the hardcore job of being the most successful envoy at FW's court.
Ha! I thought that was funny too :)
This is why I maintain that if FW had wanted sex, Seckendorff would have done whatever it took to advance the cause of Seckendorff.
Would read! :)
SD trying to forestall a marriage she doesn't want by arguing that Wilhelmine's too young and will reproach her parents someday if she ends up unhappily married...that's pretty brazen, considering the quote at the beginning of the book where SD is writing about two-year-old FoW asking about his future bride, aka TWO-MONTH-OLD Wilhelmine.
Ha! I didn't catch that, but I should have :)
I wouldn't wish such a fate on Wilhelmine, but wooow, can you imagine Lord Hervey recording how this went down??
50 more pages. Wilhelmine has arrived in Bayreuth and is not impressed. Oster is arguing that contemporaneous letters she sent to family show that it wasn't as bad as Wilhelmine later recounted in her memoirs. As opposed to Wilhelmine putting a good face on it?
Particularly this letter:
"Everyone's nice to me here, Dad! It would be great, except I miss you so much. Please send $$$, renovations desperately needed."
None of that strikes me as either something that should be taken at face value or as counterevidence to the memoirs.
Also, lol at imagining that letter being written by Wilhelmine the modern AU college student. :P
One essay/lecture that was linked at the Bayreuth website about Wilhelmine goes into those letters after her marriage, and shows Wilhelmine writing to FW, SD and Fritz about the same time but quite differently, tailored to recipient. And yes, FW gets the most polyanna letter. Considering he made her sign a disclaimer that she gave up her right to inheritance from SD just before the marriage as a last minute surprise and that as a result she was financially still very much dependent on him (and that her father-in-law had expected more cash), I think any letter from Wilhelmine to Dad has to be taken with extreme caution as to the veracity. And with SD, SD's general disapproval of the marriage was still hanging over her, so a "see, Mom, at least my husband loves me, and I'm doing well!" argument is ongoing.
Just a few pages today, but at least I kept my momentum going. Wilhelmine's daughter has been born, and the Margrave is trying to make sure FW doesn't implicitly take over his principality, by means of asking forgiveness rather than permission regarding the baptism, lol.
Waaay behind on comments, but read another 21 pages. I very nearly didn't do any German, but then I imagined cahn yelling at me, and I buckled down right before bed. Reading group works!
The Margrave has just recovered from being sick and has started to notice Marwitz, uh oh.
22 pages. Fritz has just left his Bayreuth relatives standing there like poodles in the rain, which is a *fantastic* image. I've learned more German idioms from Oster than in all the rest of my reading combined. :D
Comments this weekend! You can now see that detective work, mostly Stratemann and Keith related, has taken up most of my week (plus it was an unusually busy week at work--gradually improving my sleep has meant more time at work and less time for salon. But also money to buy books! Which reminds me, I need to scan the 2 volumes of LM letters we do have.)
* Oh, Podewils was Grumbkow's son-in-law! I feel like I've run into that like 3 times and have forgotten it every time. So, goodbye English-friendly Knyphausen (Ariane's father) and hello Grumbkow son-in-law.
* That letter where Charles VI asks FW to not kill his son? Oster says Seckendorff only handed it over when the pardon was a done deal. Because it's Seckendorff, I believe it, but I'd like to see a citation.
* FW asking the preachers whether a father can force his daughter to get married: apparently one said yes! The preacher of the Garrison Church in Potsdam. (Where both FW and Fritz would be buried until Nazi times, if I'm remembering correctly.)
* Contra Wilhelmine's memoirs, Oster doesn't think that SD proposed the future Margrave of Bayreuth as a possible match, not even as a decoy.
* Oster has the "don't get married just to get me out of prison" letter, AWWW. I still love the mutual self-sacrifice between these two. YOU TWO. <3
* Oh, the future Margrave's regiment later got renamed the Ansbach-Bayreuther dragoons! I was *wondering* where that name came from. Duuuh. cahn, they will later distinguish themselves at the battle of Hohenfriedberg in 1745, one of Fritz's great victories. Wikipedia:
At this point the Prussian Bayreuth Dragoons, an oversize unit numbering around 1,500 men, entered the battle. A strong gust of wind blew away the powder smoke and the dust and revealed an opening in the Austrian lines through which to charge the vulnerable Austrian infantry. The dragoons deployed into line, and attacked north against the right flank of the first Austrian line. They drove all the way along that line, routing it completely, then turned south to destroy the second Austrian line.
The Austrians, already outnumbered, abandoned by their Saxon allies, without cavalry protection, and now broken by this attack, began to surrender en masse. The Bayreuth Dragoons defeated several thousand Austrian infantry and only suffered 94 casualties. The Dragoons overran twenty battalions, took 2,500 prisoners, capturing 67 flags and standards as well as four cannons in what is considered and celebrated as one of the great cavalry battlefield triumphs. The battle ended with the complete defeat of the Austro-Saxon army.
* Lol at SD protecting her girls' delicate ears from dirty sexual jokes.
* FW on his boar hunt: We're going to kill a bunch of pigs and everyone has to buy the meat! Especially if you're Jewish.
Sigh. Less expensive and more offensive than Fritz making them buy porcelain, I guess.
* Oster on Wilhelmine bringing Marwitz to Bayreuth: Little did she know that this girl would one day ruin her marriage.
That's right, blame the woman.
* Fritz writing to Wilhelmine after her wedding: "When I see you, you will again find the brother who dares [emphasis mine] to show you tenderness." Everybody stop being so hard on him for the wedding! We have the letter from Grumbkow telling him to set boundaries! There are plenty of other things to be hard on Fritz for, you won't have to do without.
* Schwager: I keep seeing this word used, not just for what I would call a brother-in-law, but also for the relationship between the FW and Wilhelmine's father-in-law, for which English has no single word. So German 1) actually has a word for that relationship, 2) it's the same as brother-in-law?
* Fritz in 1732: Can I go to Bayreuth with you, Dad? Can I can I can I?
Oster: The memory of the last trip FW had taken through south Germany with Fritz was too fresh...
I bet.
* Lol at the whole *drama* over Wilhelmine's daughter's baptism. I'm sorry you're being born into a dysfunctional family, little Friederike! [selenak, do we know what name she went by?]
* Fritz was godfather! Aww, I had either forgotten that or not known it. But of course he was.
* Fritz on October 19, 1732: If I could make gold, I would first use my knowledge to help out Wilhelmine.
If you could make gold, huh? I wonder if Fritz talked about making gold before 1732, or if we're seeing traces of Fredersdorf here.
* Speaking of Fritz and Fredersdorf, as we head into Christmas 1732, Fritz had been visiting FW at Wusterhausen before Wilhelmine arrived! I had missed that and assumed it was the first visit in a while, and wrote accordingly. Oh well! Fanfic takes liberties with chronology.
* This part, though, zomg:
Fritz to Wilhelmine: Don't bring too many servants, or Dad will fire them, and don't bring your musician right away. Let him come later, and don't let anyone find out he belongs to you.
THAT part of our fics was spot on! Wow, I didn't realize cahn and I had accidentally fictionalized an actualfax letter!
Also,
Nimm nicht viel Dienerschaft mit, denn er willdaran streichen
I'm assuming "streichen" is "remove", not, as Google hilariously translated it, "paint". Though Fredersdorf is nearly tall enough to get painted!
cahn, you missed the chance to include that scene. :P (Though historically, as far as I can tell, FW hadn't taken up painting yet. What is fic for if not for chronological liberties!)
* Another thing I got wrong that I will pretend was intentional conflation of minor characters: the Sonsfeld who takes care of little Friederike while Wilhelmine is in Berlin is not Sonsine the much loved, but her inexperienced sister who's like, "Halp, a baby, what do?" Or at least so Wilhelmine claims in her letter to try to get money for a proper nurse--I hope that was partly a rhetorical device!
* Fritz is disillusioned with the English and "hates everything English."
Lehndorff: :-(
* Judging by the letters and not the memoirs, Fritz had already left for his regiment when the German comedian episode happened, because Wilhelmine reports to him on it.
THAT is one chronological liberty I will stand and die by! Besides, we were writing fanfic of her memoirs. :P
* Fritz of Bayreuth: *loves his baby* Fritz of Bayreuth: Please don't tell your sarcastic brother-in-law. Wilhelmine to Fritz: Please tease my husband about this.
Okay, Wilhelmine?
* Wilhelmine: Dr. Superville saved my husband after a stroke! I will take this opportunity to note that he is of French extraction and comes from a good family.
* Superville on Fritz in 1739: much wit/spirit/intelligence, but a bad heart and a terrible character. He's suspicious, stubborn, excessive, selfish, ungrateful, vicious, and unless I'm very much mistaken, will someday be even stingier than his father.
Oster: He's not wrong.
Me: Well spotted in 1739! Here's one person who wasn't caught off guard in 1740.
* Wilhelmine and the Margrave set off for Italy and France in 1739! This is not ringing a bell at ALL! Wow.
That sucks that it didn't work out and they had to wait another 15 years, at which point she was very sick. :( :( :( I'm glad she was healthy enough to enjoy it, at least.
* Per Oster, Wilhelmine knew about her husband/Marwitz in 1739, but Fritz didn't.
* Oh, something I forgot to mention from the earliest pages:
Daß die Akademie der Wissenschaften unter Friedrich Wilhelm I. für die Bezahlung der Hofnarren zuständig war, sagt eigentlich alles.
That the court fool was responsible for the Academy of Sciences under FW really says it all.
Things like this are why I had *no* concept of Gundling as anything *but* the court fool until selenak stepped in. MacDonogh's the same.
You do remember correctly re: the Garrison church.
Schwager: I keep seeing this word used, not just for what I would call a brother-in-law, but also for the relationship between the FW and Wilhelmine's father-in-law, for which English has no single word. So German 1) actually has a word for that relationship, 2) it's the same as brother-in-law?
It usually means "brother-in-law", but in old fashioned German, it used to mean any male in-law, which the old Margrave was.
Wilhelmine's daughter did go by "Friederike". And I did translate Wilhelmine's letter about her husband being adorable about the baby for you back in the day. :) Fritz as godfather: alas he wasn't a good one, in the sense that he actually did something for the girl. Now part of it was that he didn't see her often, due to geography (what with her living either in Franconia with her parents or in Swabia with her husband), and she didn't visit Berlin a lot. (Enough to impress Lehndorff with her beauty, though.) But Fritz quite openly writes to Wilhelmine in the 1750s, when she's fretting about her daughter's marriage, that "the only interest I have in your daughter is because of her mother". Exchanges between Fritz and Wilhelmine about adult Friederike tend to go thusly:
W: Visiting Stuttgart right now. My son-in-law is incredibly jealous and possessive re: my daughter. I think it's creepy, and doesn't bode well for how the marriage will go if the honeymoon era is over. F: Eh, isn't it good if a young bride has her husband's undivided attention? Your daughter should count herself lucky. W: Visiting Stuttgart again. Now he's having favourites. F: Men will be men. I knew he was like that when he was still growing up at my court. W: I've heard a rumor the Duke is secretly considering converting to Catholicism like his father and will make my daughter do the same. Please advise? F: Your daughter converting to Catholicism is a no-go. She's the Duchess in a Protestant principality where people hated the last Duke's guts for converting. Since her marriage is not going well, her being Protestant is all she has to assure herself of being in the public favor, and that can be useful to her if her husband turns more against her. W: Thanks, that's actually good ad.... F: Also I need Würtemberg to continue as my ally, not MT's, so your daughter better ensure her husband doesn't convert.
Daß die Akademie der Wissenschaften unter Friedrich Wilhelm I. für die Bezahlung der Hofnarren zuständig war, sagt eigentlich alles.
That the court fool was responsible for the Academy of Sciences under FW really says it all.
That's the wrong translation, though. "That the Academy of the Sciences under FW was responsible for paying the court fools (plural) salaries says it all."
I mean, the general meaning in the larger context presumably is still the same, re: the standing of the academy in FW's time, but in the interest of your German, I clarified.
* Ugh at Wilhelmine wanting to see FW before he died and none of the men in her life letting her. I totally get why Fritz was doing his usual "for your own good" move, but ugh. You shouldn't have to ask permission to visit your dying father.
* Wilhelmine may have expected Fritz to summon her straight to Berlin after he became king. I've always been surprised that he didn't! Even before I knew that she spent several months there immediately after her daughter was born. I would be interested to hear the selenak take on this. Yes, he still would have abandoned her to go off to war, but he sent for Algarotti and Duhan and a bunch of other people that he only abandoned after a few months. Why only a brief visit to Wilhelmine on a trip that was mainly for other purposes, and then an eventual invitation to come visit in October?
Also, lol at Oster saying the trip to Strasbourg was for political purposes. The rest of the trip, yes. Strasbourg?
Fritz: It is very important that Europe be prepared for my willingness to cross borders illegally.
:P
* Bei dieser Lebensweise verfliegt die Zeit so rasch, daß ich wünschte, die Tage hätten 24 Stunden.
They don't? Does this mean "waking hours" in German or something?
* Oster has the "there stands one who will avenge me" quote!
* War starts, and Wilhelmine is very encouraging to the Austrian envoy and says that she wishes Fritz hadn't invaded, that Bayreuth will not fight on his side, and that they will remain loyal to MT. That's more than just lunch!
* Wilhelmine and Margrave: Hey, if it's asserting old claims time, maybe we can get Nuremberg for Bayreuth! Fritz: I would advise against. Wilhelmine and Margrave: ???
Macaulay: His first object was to rob the Queen of Hungary. His second was that, if possible, nobody should rob her but himself.
* Fritz: You should totally fight on my side! Wilhelmine and Margrave: We made an alliance against the Habsburgs! Fritz: Too late, I already made a separate peace. Allies gotta fend for themselves. Wilhelmine and Margrave: ??? Fritz: *kicks off the Second Silesian War* MT: What about that peace? Fritz: Allies need me!
Oster: "The accusations of faithlessness bounced right off him."
15-yo Mildred: My FAVE. :D :D :D
Superville: See? SEE? I called this in 1739 and no one believed me! Voltaire was still getting the Anti-Machiavel published in 1740!
* Man trinke mit seiner Geliebten ja auch keinen Kräutertee
I get the gist of this (it's what I said in my Peter Keith post about Fritz not having a high opinion of the political prowess of people he met socially), but what is this about herbal tea?
Wilhelmine may have expected Fritz to summon her straight to Berlin after he became king. I've always been surprised that he didn't!
First of all: when did Wilhelmine's one and only visit to Rheinsberg (which coincided with the last time Fritz was there as far as I recall, after he was King already) happen? I just have a vague "early in his rule" memory, but that's covering anything between 1740 and the end of the first Silesian War.
As to why he didn't call her to Berlin straight away: honestly, I think it's for the Prince Hal/Henry V. reason. Everbody but everybody knew how close he and Wilhelmine had been throughout their childhood and adolescence. People also expected her to play a big role in his regime. (See Seckendorff the younger noting that SD might have miscalculated by dissing her daughter so much because Fritz, Seckendorff the younger thought, was going to resent that once he was King when Wilhelmine surely would be a major star at his court.) And remember that letter he wrote to Queen Caroline about how he'd never marry anyone but Princess Emily, one of the earliest things he apologized to FW for? (Not least because he could objectively see it had been a big mistake, no future monarch should tie himself down like this.) This letter, so said Fritz to several people and so Wilhelmine admits in her memoirs, had not only been written at Mom's urgings, but also Wilhelmine's. And because FW was so very publically angry about this, this was known to all and sunder as the example of Fritz politically influenced by women (tm), specifically, his mother and sister. Incidentally, bear also in mind the greater context. It's telling he wrote that letter to Caroline, not to Uncle George. Even in Prussia, they evidently knew Caroline was the brains of that operation. And while Reinette was not yet Louis XV's maitresse en titre, otherws were. In Russia, you had a Czarina on the throne. So: you have several major European powers dominated (in the public eye) by women, even when they were nominally ruled by men.
So I think Fritz, very set on remaking himself in the eyes of the public as der Einzige König, wanted to make it absolutely clear that no, he was NOT going to be influenced or dominated by anyone, including his favourite sister. Hence no immediate summonings. (Algarotti and Duhan were different - no one had expected them to exert any influence on him. People very much expected Wilhelmine to. Ergo: no summonings to make it clear she won't be the Power behind his Throne. Later visists, once he's won glory for himself and impressed everyone, are different, of course.
The saying actually is "ich wünschte, die Tage hätten mehr als 24 Stunden". I suspect the editor slipped up and didn't catch some leftout words.
Herbal tea: commonly associated with curing cold. You get doused with it by your doctors. Very sensible, not-well-tasting and unerotic. Note Fritz is casting Voltaire as his mistress there.
Another 20 pages. The Marwitz drama is hitting its climax, and Fritz is about to start getting upset about the Erlangen journalist. :(
Since I'm doing 20 pages with very little effort, and I'm not actually making myself do more than that, cahn, let's raise my weekend quota to 30 and my weekday quota to 25? We all know I'm capable of doing 50, but as my concentration improves, I'm trying to do some things besides German, and of course salon calls. :) Among those non-German things is The Club, which I'm currently reading at the suggestion of the Amazon recommendation algorithm. I don't know how accurate it may be, but since practically everything in it is new to me, I'm finding it very engrossing. At the very least, it's a good starting point for "Who are these people whose names and sometimes works you know, but not much more?"
All of which is to say, I'm no longer spending 100% of my free time on German, but I also don't want to lose my momentum, because I'm SO. CLOSE. But I'm so far that if I stop, what little command I do have will be gone before I know it.
34 pages! See, I can do it if I try. Wilhelmine is visiting Sanssouci for the first time, in 1750.
I admit I omitted her presence from Lovers, where she really should have been on Fritz's radar in the first chapter. The problem was that she's *so* important that it would have been hard to keep her from dominating the very specific story I wanted to tell, and she didn't fit into that set of parallels I was developing. But I gave her a starring role in the other fic!
27 pages. Quota met! If I meet my quota again tomorrow, I will finish the book. Then the plan is vol 2 of her memoirs (to give cahn a breathing space), and then Lehndorff!
I read up through the end of the Italy trip. The Seven Years' War is coming, then death. :/
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timeasmymeasure
Oster Wilhelmine readthrough
Date: 2020-09-25 03:13 am (UTC)No comments tonight, as it's my bedtime, and also
Good luck with the Enlightenment nominations, guys! Sorry I'm not more help, but, you know, German and sleep. #priorities But I'm following the developments and silently cheering you on.
Re: Oster Wilhelmine readthrough
Date: 2020-09-25 05:41 am (UTC)Re: Oster Wilhelmine readthrough
Date: 2020-09-26 03:43 am (UTC)(What's more impressive is that I read those 50 pages between 4:30 and 9 pm, meaning much faster than ever before. I could have done more, but I didn't want to burn out.)
Wilhelmine and SD are at the ball and have just learned that Fritz tried to escape.
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Date: 2020-09-25 03:39 pm (UTC)Currently we're at "Circle of Voltaire RPF", though I still think it's silly that past Yuletides in the last two years signed off on "19th Century German Literature RPF" (which in theory would have encompassed anyone from E.T.A. Hoffmann to Thomas Mann, who did start to publish before the century ended), and "19th Century British Writers RPF" (ditto, and did include Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll as well as Byron and the Shelleys), i.e. an enormous amount of time, and a cast of thousands who don't have anything in common but geography, but "Enlightenment Writers and Scientists" is too broad. Ah well.
Re: Oster Wilhelmine readthrough
Date: 2020-09-25 05:04 pm (UTC)Kind of a moot point now, but would "Natural Philosophers" have fit the bill? I suppose Hervey not so much, but you might be able to make a slant case for Lady Mary given the inoculation stuff... But Circle of Voltaire is nice because we don't have to make a case for every single character being a natural philosopher, which I think we could do but would get tiresome.
...and now that I've read your defense, I think I should just co-opt that for the promo post! Because I think that should get anyone interested in this set of characters :)
The artist formerly known as Enlightenment RPF
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Date: 2020-09-28 12:06 am (UTC)I'm not going to pick a fight in the Yuletide admin community, but let's not forget "Historical Royals and Their Favourites RPF", which the mods and a couple of us, myself included, arrived at after much discussion, for which the nominated characters included Alexander the Great (4th century BCE Macedon) and James VI and I (17th century CE Great Britain). 2000 years and an entire continent, and we went with a gender-neutral "royals" specifically to make sure women like Anne could get included if needed. I mean, we could have included Catherine and Poniatowksi for 18th century Russia! Gilgamesh and Enkidu, probably. :P
But all right, Circle of Voltaire it is. :D
Algarotti: *I'm* the one who's six degrees from everyone who even slightly overlaps the 1700-1799 period!
Voltaire: Nobody knows who you are. Even in the salon, nobody had heard of you before last year.
Algarotti: :(
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From:Re: Oster Wilhelmine readthrough - young Wilhelmine
Date: 2020-09-26 06:52 pm (UTC)Oster: Well, Fritz won't be *happy*, exactly...
Me: :-(
* So remember when we discussed how Wilhelmine resented her first two brothers (named Fritz) and our Fritz was the first one she showed affection to? And
Well, Oster reports the following:
1707, November 23, 1707: Bb!Fritz1 born.
Barely six months later: Bb!Fritz1 dies. The internet gives me May 13, 1708.
1709, July 3: Wilhelmine born.
1710, August 16: Bb!Fritz2 born.
1711, July 31: Bb!Fritz2 dies.
1712, January 24: Bb!Fritz3 born.
1712, February 8: Grandpa F1 writes in a letter, "sie ihre zwei ersten Brüder nicht leiden konnte"--she couldn't stand her first two brothers.
What's wrong with this picture?
The first of the two brothers in question died before she was born!
What's up with that, F1? I can believe that she didn't like the one that was born when she was one and died when she was two, especially since he got all the attention that she didn't, but she's being falsely accused of things that happened before she was born!
I wonder if F1's having a memory lapse here, or if something else is going on.
* The bit about FW being impressed by Dutch burgher values, like cleanliness and orderliness, is relevant to why the servant book I read is specifically about servants in *France* during the period. The author makes the point that French upper class values were about conspicuous consumption, so servants did a lot of standing around in livery looking handsome and making you look wealthy, and very little attention in "how to run your household" manuals was devoted to things like making sure servants dusted and kept the fire going. So there was gold and marble and filth everywhere, and the living space was uncomfortable to live in but very eye-catching. French travelers who went to England or the Netherlands were amazed at how clean and comfortable the houses were, and the servants were actually supposed to take scrubbing the floors and such seriously.
* Heinrich Rüdiger von Ilgen: I'm recognizing more and more obscure names! This is the father of Baroness von Knyphausen, Ariane's mother, who receives that box from Fritz in the opening scene of "Lovers lying two and two."
Knyphausen, the minister who's pro-English marriage and eventually loses his job over it, is, as I said in the Wilhelmine memoir write-up recently, Ariane's father.
* Google wasn't able to translate "Knirps", as in "König Knirps", Wilhelmine and Fritz's not-so-respectful nickname for Dad, but when I put it in the browser, I got "midget, squirt, little fellow." Lol! The little fellow and his long fellows.
* Loved Oster pointing out what I had noticed when rereading the memoirs: evil governess Leti's introduction was all about how she was Italian, from no family to speak of, and had an unprestigious job correcting newspaper prints, whereas wonderful Sonsine's introduction is all about how noble her family was and how her ancestors distinguished themselves with all the services they performed. !!!
Lehndorff, who's not exactly not a snob himself: This Wilhelmine is a bit hung up on class.
This is why I put in two of the things that
Also, the servants book has a good section on the tension between servants and families that resulted in the cycle of abuse: badly treated servants were more likely to treat their masters' children badly. Including: total neglect, meaning wealthy kids were sometimes half-starved; sexual abuse: the older men in the house molest the maidservants, who molest the boys, who grow up with a fucked up attitude toward sex and proceed to molest their own servants.
As the century went on and middle-class family-and-home values started to percolate upwards in France, the thrust of moralizing works directed at servants charged with caring for children went in a little over a hundred years from "You are responsible before God for every child who dies as a result of your action or inaction," to, "It's probably not healthy to give kids everything they want all the time. Tell them no once in a while?"
* Oster doesn't think FW's kids went hungry, because Seckendorff didn't report inadequate portions. He thinks FW's tastes in food weren't to the liking of SD, who taught her kids to despise it. While I'm absolutely sure this happened, I'm not convinced the kids never went hungry, or that they didn't learn to associate it with their father.
Fritz's weight at Dresden, combined with his height, tell me he wasn't underweight at 16. But even if FW was starving the kids every chance he got (and I suspect it was more like small portion sizes than actual starvation), SD was apparently smuggling them food (I think this was in Lavisse?) *and* FW was away a lot. So it's quite possible that FW was frugal in terms of portion sizes and the kids got compensation later.
But that's not evidence that he *was*, just that he could have been.
The two additional pieces of evidence I have beyond Wilhelmine's memoirs are these:
Fritz writing a letter to Grumbkow (?) at Küstrin, saying he preferred to starve there than at Potsdam. Now, this is not when he's being his most fair to FW, and could be part of the SD "this is not acceptable food" rhetoric, but...
Ziebura says *AW* later said he and the other kids were often half-starved as kids. If Wilhelmine, Fritz, *and* AW all agree on something about FW...maybe they're not making it up. Now, I haven't seen the context, or even a direct quote, for that claim, but I'm keeping it as supporting evidence until I do.
Re: Oster Wilhelmine readthrough - young Wilhelmine
Date: 2020-09-27 04:58 am (UTC)I wonder if F1's having a memory lapse here, or if something else is going on.
It probably was a memory lapse. My other guess would be projection, but projection of what? The baby Sophie Charlotte had before FW, one Friedrich August, died before FW was born, and she never had any more children. As for F1's own childhood, he was son no.3 himself, with two brothers ahead of him, one of whom died before F1 was born. (The other - Karl Emil! - was one of those he later suspected his stepmother of killing, along with his younger brother Ludwig. Two more (fullL) siblings died as babies. Then came stepmom and all the Schwedt half siblings.
"Knirps" is a bit old fashioned but still in use today, though mostly used for little children.
Wilhelmine the snob: oh, absolutely. Mind you, I suspect this tendency in her was strengthened via the awareness the Hohenzollern were considered as upstarts (what with the very recent kingly title) by the rest of Europe, and of course SD had it drummed into her that she was meant for higher things and FW was completely undignified and no one was to follow his example from the get go. I could also see child Wilhelmine extra internalizing class bias precisely because of Leti, i.e. this woman had been given power over her and abused her, and she clung to her self confidence by telling herself "I'm still better than you, Italian lowlife!"
Which, btw, leads into what you say about servants and the chains of abuse and neglect. Governesses also had this weird in between status - not really part of the servants, but also not really on a level with the family that gets talked about a lot in any book about the Brontes. Presumably Leti had had her own experiences, too. (And as Oster points out at the very least must have been well educated, because she did give Wilhelmine a first class education in terms of knowledge, see also the difference between child Wilhemine's letters to child AW's letters to FW in style and maturity.)
I'm also reminded that Byron (the poet) was sexually abused by a nurse when he was ten or eleven. She was also a strict Calvinist who altered between punishing him, groping him and quoting the bible at him. It's not surprising adult Byron didn't care much for religion, and scandalized the country.
Food question: I'm with you there.
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From:Re: Oster Wilhelmine readthrough - marriage negotiations
Date: 2020-09-26 09:55 pm (UTC)* The Hannovers (Guelphs) had to make permission to visit Hannover one of their conditions for accepting the throne of GB. This is ringing a bell, but I'd forgotten that. I can see why it became a point of contention.
* In 1724/1725, the Magdeburgers brought some sort of lawsuit against FW at the Imperial Court? Do you know anything more about this,
* Lol, so we already knew Seckendorff sometimes couldn't write reports the next morning because of the insane hangover from keeping up with FW the night before, and we knew he used to suck on an empty pipe at the tobacco parliament, but it was entertaining reading Oster's write-up of how "the staunch non-smoker got permission to put an empty pipe in his mouth for form's sake," and how periodically Seckendorff had to go take the waters to recover a little from the hardcore job of being the most successful envoy at FW's court. This is why I maintain that if FW had wanted sex, Seckendorff would have done whatever it took to advance the cause of Seckendorff.
Also, he lived to be 90, so I guess the lifestyle didn't ruin his health *too* much. :P
* Another minor character: Adrian Bernhard von Borcke is the father of FW2 educator Borcke.
* In July 1728, French Count Rottembourg says he has reason to believe Fritz will try running away. Now, my sources all say that he was recalled from Prussia in 1727 and stationed in Spain. So either he has contacts that are keeping him up to date, or Fritz was talking about running away even before that, or both.
* Speaking of running away...remember how on January 21, 1730 Peter got sent to Wesel and Fritz's governors got strict instructions to sleep with him every single night? And Koser said that the governor order was because FW feared Fritz trying to escape?
This is the first time I've seen evidence for that (as opposed to other types of nocturnal shenanigans) being the reason: on January 31, Oster says FW returns to Berlin, where all the envoys write reports expressing their surprise at how he's letting Fritz off with a mild scolding, in light of a recent anonymous letter FW received warning him that Fritz has escape plans. Proposed envoy reasons for this uncharacteristic behavior:
- This milder treatment is only apparent, not real.
- FW's trying the carrot instead of the stick.
- FW's trying to keep Fritz from encouraging Wilhelmine in her resistance to her prospective bridegrooms.
No dice on the last one, says Oster: Fritz is willing to suffer anything if it keeps Wilhelmine out of a miserable marriage! Oster will later quote the letter from Fritz to Wilhelmine saying, "Don't get married just to get me out of prison, I mean it."
Aaaand, Oster cites Fritz writing in 1730 to the Margrave of Schwedt that if he marries Wilhelmine, he'll "regret it sooner or later," the implication being when Fritz becomes king. This would fit well in a Mafia AU, along with "You know who we should kidnap, Heinrich?" :P
Poor younger sister Sophia Dorothea. :/
* SD trying to forestall a marriage she doesn't want by arguing that Wilhelmine's too young and will reproach her parents someday if she ends up unhappily married...that's pretty brazen, considering the quote at the beginning of the book where SD is writing about two-year-old FoW asking about his future bride, aka TWO-MONTH-OLD Wilhelmine.
* I like the way Oster analyzes "But did event X in Wilhelmine's memoirs *really* happen?" every so often I've been wondering what's backed up with documentary evidence and what isn't.
1) FW wanting to marry her to August the Strong: probably not, says Oster, no external evidence, and surely SD would freak out.
2) August the Strong trying to get Wilhelmine married to Weißenfels: definitely not, says Oster.
I was not aware that Weißenfels was a possible rival to the Saxon electorate due to religion, and that this might lie behind FW's interest in getting Wilhelmine married to him. That was interesting!
3) August letting his son decide he didn't want to marry Wilhelmine: seems unlikely, says Oster.
I mean, I'm sure there would have been pressure, but not everyone is FW? Even Wilhelmine got to turn down a couple candidates (at a high price) before accepting one under duress. I'm neutral on this point, pending further evidence...
* When Ferdinand was born and SD was bedridden, FW showed favor to Wilhelmine by letting her look after 4-yo Heinrich...who at the time was his favorite? What about AW?
Friedrich Wilhelms gute Laune ging an diesem Tag sogar so weit, daß er Wilhelmine auftrug, während Sophie Dorothea im Wochen bett lag, für ihren Bruder Heinrich zu sorgen, der damals sein Liebling war.
* Huh. So I did remember that the idea of Fritz becoming governor in Hannover until FW died was proposed as part of the marriage deal, but Oster adds that the British agreed to this, only instead of giving the governorship to Fritz, they would give it to
A WOMANAmelia!I take back what I said long ago about this marriage going better than the EC marriage.
Fritz: Franz Stephan, I am not. I'm also an expert in marital warfare even at this tender age. Bring it on.
* Also! G2 says that due to their youth, Fritz and Amelia would live in England at first. So I'm wrong, we *don't* need a successful escape AU in order to get Fritz at the British court while G2 and Caroline are accusing Wilhelmine of faking her pregnancy and FoW is trying to get her into a carriage to St. James in the presence of the brother who's perfectly willing to threaten her prospective husbands with vague but dire future consequences.
I wouldn't wish such a fate on Wilhelmine, but wooow, can you imagine Lord Hervey recording how this went down??
* Speaking of not wishing things on Wilhelmine, Oster says Melusine expressed pity for Wilhelmine as the future wife of FoW. I suppose our speculation about her being on good terms with FoW (politically, if nothing else) wouldn't rule out realizing he's not great husband material.
(I still can't believe that one lecturer thought she was a fictional character inspired by a Fontane novel; my copy of Zeithain has a Personenregister listing who everyone is and their dates, and she's in there!
EHRENGARD MELUSINE VON DER SCHULENBURG, Herzogin von Kendal (ab 1719), * 25.12.1667 in Emden; † 10.5.1743 in Kendal House, Isleworth bei Brentford, Mätresse von Georg I., König von England)
* Oster trusts Catt, sigh. Thanks be that you read prefaces,
Re: Oster Wilhelmine readthrough - marriage negotiations
Date: 2020-09-27 04:28 am (UTC)At any event: why would Wilhelmine need to supervise Heinrich during SD's labor and ensueing lying-in anyway? That's what the staff is for. Heinrich having joined AW's household as of his fourth birthday in January, he wasn't even staying with his mother's household anymore. Note that in the letters from eight years old AW to FW which Cahn could read, which describe what the boys do all day, there's no mention of Mom or their oldest sister anywhere, just of Heinrich and their tutors.
Magdeburgers: would have to look it up.
SD trying to forestall a marriage she doesn't want by arguing that Wilhelmine's too young and will reproach her parents someday if she ends up unhappily married...that's pretty brazen, considering the quote at the beginning of the book where SD is writing about two-year-old FoW asking about his future bride, aka TWO-MONTH-OLD Wilhelmine.
No kidding. It really shows how soon she got fixated on that idea.
FW wanting to marry her to August the Strong: probably not, says Oster, no external evidence, and surely SD would freak out.
On the one hand, yes, on the other there's the Fritz letter from Dresden to Wilhelmine which gives her a "hot or not?" report on August the Strong. Now maybe it's just because Fritz assumes his sister would want to know more about their host, but date wise, it works with when the memoirs say the match was talked about, i.e. between FW's short lived "am gonna abdicate and live the true Christian life with my wife and daughters at Wusterhausen" idea and the Dresden visit. Maybe it wasn't as serious a possibility as she presents it in her memoirs, but what I do think is possible that Grumbkow, who was after all the FW/August liason, put it out there in some drunken rounds, and FW didn't immediately say no, which would have been enough for rumors to start and filter through to Wilhelmine and Fritz.
I take back what I said long ago about this marriage going better than the EC marriage.
Fritz: Franz Stephan, I am not. I'm also an expert in marital warfare even at this tender age. Bring it on.
LOL. And Amelia/Emily comes across as way more strong willed than EC, too. Mind you, her own experience with royal marriage would have been with Caroline managing G2 by pretending to worship to the ground he tread on but manipulating him into accepting all her ideas as his.
I wouldn't wish such a fate on Wilhelmine, but wooow, can you imagine Lord Hervey recording how this went down??
Quite. And Fritz of Prussia would have done him the favor of always talking in French when insulting the Hannover clan, too.
Re: Oster Wilhelmine readthrough - marriage negotiations
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From:HRE politics
Date: 2020-09-29 01:03 am (UTC)I was busy looking into this, and I still haven't found it, but what I did find was very interesting.
Brandenburg had possessed the expectation of certain limited rights in Limpurg since 1693...When the last count died in August 1713 without male heirs, Brandenburg-Prussia occupied the territory. This prompted the widowed countess to appeal to the Reichshofrat to secure the continued autonomous existence of the county. The Reichshofrat subsequently sent the Emperor a report, which related that 'Prussia invaded the Limpurg lands with a whole battalion, and even failed to spare the widowed countess’s castle from being occupied by soldiers.'
Citation: "Imperial law versus geopolitical interest: the Reichshofrat and the protection of smaller states in the Holy Roman Empire under Charles VI (1711-40)", Patrick Milton, a heavily footnoted academic paper from 2015 with primary source citations (including envoy reports), available here.
ignoring legal female heir
ignoring legal female heir
The difference being that FW recognized imperial authority and grudgingly backed down when the Reichshofrat told him to. I guess he *didn't* start a war of aggression over it.
But yeeeeeah. Between this and FW's decision to go to war to get Swedish Pomerania in 1715, I'm at least half side-eyeing that political testament.
ETA: This table looks so much better in preview. Sigh.
Re: HRE politics
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From:Re: Oster Wilhelmine readthrough - marriage negotiations
Date: 2020-10-02 04:33 am (UTC)Ha! I thought that was funny too :)
This is why I maintain that if FW had wanted sex, Seckendorff would have done whatever it took to advance the cause of Seckendorff.
Would read! :)
SD trying to forestall a marriage she doesn't want by arguing that Wilhelmine's too young and will reproach her parents someday if she ends up unhappily married...that's pretty brazen, considering the quote at the beginning of the book where SD is writing about two-year-old FoW asking about his future bride, aka TWO-MONTH-OLD Wilhelmine.
Ha! I didn't catch that, but I should have :)
I wouldn't wish such a fate on Wilhelmine, but wooow, can you imagine Lord Hervey recording how this went down??
Would definitely read! :D
Re: Oster Wilhelmine readthrough
Date: 2020-09-27 03:19 am (UTC)Particularly this letter:
"Everyone's nice to me here, Dad! It would be great, except I miss you so much. Please send $$$, renovations desperately needed."
None of that strikes me as either something that should be taken at face value or as counterevidence to the memoirs.
Also, lol at imagining that letter being written by Wilhelmine the modern AU college student. :P
Re: Oster Wilhelmine readthrough
Date: 2020-09-27 05:05 am (UTC)Re: Oster Wilhelmine readthrough
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Date: 2020-09-29 02:50 am (UTC)Re: Oster Wilhelmine readthrough
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Date: 2020-10-02 03:09 am (UTC)The Margrave has just recovered from being sick and has started to notice Marwitz, uh oh.
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Date: 2020-10-02 05:16 am (UTC)Re: Oster Wilhelmine readthrough
Date: 2020-10-03 03:30 am (UTC)Comments this weekend! You can now see that detective work, mostly Stratemann and Keith related, has taken up most of my week (plus it was an unusually busy week at work--gradually improving my sleep has meant more time at work and less time for salon. But also money to buy books! Which reminds me, I need to scan the 2 volumes of LM letters we do have.)
Re: Oster Wilhelmine readthrough - 1730s
Date: 2020-10-03 11:38 pm (UTC)* That letter where Charles VI asks FW to not kill his son? Oster says Seckendorff only handed it over when the pardon was a done deal. Because it's Seckendorff, I believe it, but I'd like to see a citation.
* FW asking the preachers whether a father can force his daughter to get married: apparently one said yes! The preacher of the Garrison Church in Potsdam. (Where both FW and Fritz would be buried until Nazi times, if I'm remembering correctly.)
* Contra Wilhelmine's memoirs, Oster doesn't think that SD proposed the future Margrave of Bayreuth as a possible match, not even as a decoy.
* Oster has the "don't get married just to get me out of prison" letter, AWWW. I still love the mutual self-sacrifice between these two. YOU TWO. <3
* Oh, the future Margrave's regiment later got renamed the Ansbach-Bayreuther dragoons! I was *wondering* where that name came from. Duuuh.
At this point the Prussian Bayreuth Dragoons, an oversize unit numbering around 1,500 men, entered the battle. A strong gust of wind blew away the powder smoke and the dust and revealed an opening in the Austrian lines through which to charge the vulnerable Austrian infantry. The dragoons deployed into line, and attacked north against the right flank of the first Austrian line. They drove all the way along that line, routing it completely, then turned south to destroy the second Austrian line.
The Austrians, already outnumbered, abandoned by their Saxon allies, without cavalry protection, and now broken by this attack, began to surrender en masse. The Bayreuth Dragoons defeated several thousand Austrian infantry and only suffered 94 casualties. The Dragoons overran twenty battalions, took 2,500 prisoners, capturing 67 flags and standards as well as four cannons in what is considered and celebrated as one of the great cavalry battlefield triumphs. The battle ended with the complete defeat of the Austro-Saxon army.
* Lol at SD protecting her girls' delicate ears from dirty sexual jokes.
* FW on his boar hunt: We're going to kill a bunch of pigs and everyone has to buy the meat! Especially if you're Jewish.
Sigh. Less expensive and more offensive than Fritz making them buy porcelain, I guess.
* Oster on Wilhelmine bringing Marwitz to Bayreuth: Little did she know that this girl would one day ruin her marriage.
That's right, blame the woman.
* Fritz writing to Wilhelmine after her wedding: "When I see you, you will again find the brother who dares [emphasis mine] to show you tenderness." Everybody stop being so hard on him for the wedding! We have the letter from Grumbkow telling him to set boundaries! There are plenty of other things to be hard on Fritz for, you won't have to do without.
* Schwager: I keep seeing this word used, not just for what I would call a brother-in-law, but also for the relationship between the FW and Wilhelmine's father-in-law, for which English has no single word. So German 1) actually has a word for that relationship, 2) it's the same as brother-in-law?
* Fritz in 1732: Can I go to Bayreuth with you, Dad? Can I can I can I?
Oster: The memory of the last trip FW had taken through south Germany with Fritz was too fresh...
I bet.
* Lol at the whole *drama* over Wilhelmine's daughter's baptism. I'm sorry you're being born into a dysfunctional family, little Friederike! [
* Fritz was godfather! Aww, I had either forgotten that or not known it. But of course he was.
* Fritz on October 19, 1732: If I could make gold, I would first use my knowledge to help out Wilhelmine.
If you could make gold, huh? I wonder if Fritz talked about making gold before 1732, or if we're seeing traces of Fredersdorf here.
* Speaking of Fritz and Fredersdorf, as we head into Christmas 1732, Fritz had been visiting FW at Wusterhausen before Wilhelmine arrived! I had missed that and assumed it was the first visit in a while, and wrote accordingly. Oh well! Fanfic takes liberties with chronology.
* This part, though, zomg:
Fritz to Wilhelmine: Don't bring too many servants, or Dad will fire them, and don't bring your musician right away. Let him come later, and don't let anyone find out he belongs to you.
THAT part of our fics was spot on! Wow, I didn't realize
Also,
Nimm nicht viel Dienerschaft mit, denn er willdaran streichen
I'm assuming "streichen" is "remove", not, as Google hilariously translated it, "paint". Though Fredersdorf is nearly tall enough to get painted!
* Another thing I got wrong that I will pretend was intentional conflation of minor characters: the Sonsfeld who takes care of little Friederike while Wilhelmine is in Berlin is not Sonsine the much loved, but her inexperienced sister who's like, "Halp, a baby, what do?" Or at least so Wilhelmine claims in her letter to try to get money for a proper nurse--I hope that was partly a rhetorical device!
* Fritz is disillusioned with the English and "hates everything English."
Lehndorff: :-(
* Judging by the letters and not the memoirs, Fritz had already left for his regiment when the German comedian episode happened, because Wilhelmine reports to him on it.
THAT is one chronological liberty I will stand and die by! Besides, we were writing fanfic of her memoirs. :P
* Fritz of Bayreuth: *loves his baby*
Fritz of Bayreuth: Please don't tell your sarcastic brother-in-law.
Wilhelmine to Fritz: Please tease my husband about this.
Okay, Wilhelmine?
* Wilhelmine: Dr. Superville saved my husband after a stroke! I will take this opportunity to note that he is of French extraction and comes from a good family.
* Superville on Fritz in 1739: much wit/spirit/intelligence, but a bad heart and a terrible character. He's suspicious, stubborn, excessive, selfish, ungrateful, vicious, and unless I'm very much mistaken, will someday be even stingier than his father.
Oster: He's not wrong.
Me: Well spotted in 1739! Here's one person who wasn't caught off guard in 1740.
* Wilhelmine and the Margrave set off for Italy and France in 1739! This is not ringing a bell at ALL! Wow.
That sucks that it didn't work out and they had to wait another 15 years, at which point she was very sick. :( :( :( I'm glad she was healthy enough to enjoy it, at least.
* Per Oster, Wilhelmine knew about her husband/Marwitz in 1739, but Fritz didn't.
* Oh, something I forgot to mention from the earliest pages:
Daß die Akademie der Wissenschaften unter Friedrich Wilhelm I. für die Bezahlung der Hofnarren zuständig war, sagt eigentlich alles.
That the court fool was responsible for the Academy of Sciences under FW really says it all.
Things like this are why I had *no* concept of Gundling as anything *but* the court fool until
:(
Re: Oster Wilhelmine readthrough - 1730s
Date: 2020-10-04 05:57 am (UTC)Schwager: I keep seeing this word used, not just for what I would call a brother-in-law, but also for the relationship between the FW and Wilhelmine's father-in-law, for which English has no single word. So German 1) actually has a word for that relationship, 2) it's the same as brother-in-law?
It usually means "brother-in-law", but in old fashioned German, it used to mean any male in-law, which the old Margrave was.
Wilhelmine's daughter did go by "Friederike". And I did translate Wilhelmine's letter about her husband being adorable about the baby for you back in the day. :) Fritz as godfather: alas he wasn't a good one, in the sense that he actually did something for the girl. Now part of it was that he didn't see her often, due to geography (what with her living either in Franconia with her parents or in Swabia with her husband), and she didn't visit Berlin a lot. (Enough to impress Lehndorff with her beauty, though.) But Fritz quite openly writes to Wilhelmine in the 1750s, when she's fretting about her daughter's marriage, that "the only interest I have in your daughter is because of her mother". Exchanges between Fritz and Wilhelmine about adult Friederike tend to go thusly:
W: Visiting Stuttgart right now. My son-in-law is incredibly jealous and possessive re: my daughter. I think it's creepy, and doesn't bode well for how the marriage will go if the honeymoon era is over.
F: Eh, isn't it good if a young bride has her husband's undivided attention? Your daughter should count herself lucky.
W: Visiting Stuttgart again. Now he's having favourites.
F: Men will be men. I knew he was like that when he was still growing up at my court.
W: I've heard a rumor the Duke is secretly considering converting to Catholicism like his father and will make my daughter do the same. Please advise?
F: Your daughter converting to Catholicism is a no-go. She's the Duchess in a Protestant principality where people hated the last Duke's guts for converting. Since her marriage is not going well, her being Protestant is all she has to assure herself of being in the public favor, and that can be useful to her if her husband turns more against her.
W: Thanks, that's actually good ad....
F: Also I need Würtemberg to continue as my ally, not MT's, so your daughter better ensure her husband doesn't convert.
Daß die Akademie der Wissenschaften unter Friedrich Wilhelm I. für die Bezahlung der Hofnarren zuständig war, sagt eigentlich alles.
That the court fool was responsible for the Academy of Sciences under FW really says it all.
That's the wrong translation, though. "That the Academy of the Sciences under FW was responsible for paying the court fools (plural) salaries says it all."
I mean, the general meaning in the larger context presumably is still the same, re: the standing of the academy in FW's time, but in the interest of your German, I clarified.
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Date: 2020-10-03 11:41 pm (UTC)* Wilhelmine may have expected Fritz to summon her straight to Berlin after he became king. I've always been surprised that he didn't! Even before I knew that she spent several months there immediately after her daughter was born. I would be interested to hear the
Also, lol at Oster saying the trip to Strasbourg was for political purposes. The rest of the trip, yes. Strasbourg?
Fritz: It is very important that Europe be prepared for my willingness to cross borders illegally.
:P
* Bei dieser Lebensweise verfliegt die Zeit so rasch, daß ich wünschte, die Tage hätten 24 Stunden.
They don't? Does this mean "waking hours" in German or something?
* Oster has the "there stands one who will avenge me" quote!
* War starts, and Wilhelmine is very encouraging to the Austrian envoy and says that she wishes Fritz hadn't invaded, that Bayreuth will not fight on his side, and that they will remain loyal to MT. That's more than just lunch!
* Wilhelmine and Margrave: Hey, if it's asserting old claims time, maybe we can get Nuremberg for Bayreuth!
Fritz: I would advise against.
Wilhelmine and Margrave: ???
Macaulay: His first object was to rob the Queen of Hungary. His second was that, if possible, nobody should rob her but himself.
* Fritz: You should totally fight on my side!
Wilhelmine and Margrave: We made an alliance against the Habsburgs!
Fritz: Too late, I already made a separate peace. Allies gotta fend for themselves.
Wilhelmine and Margrave: ???
Fritz: *kicks off the Second Silesian War*
MT: What about that peace?
Fritz: Allies need me!
Oster: "The accusations of faithlessness bounced right off him."
15-yo Mildred: My FAVE. :D :D :D
Superville: See? SEE? I called this in 1739 and no one believed me! Voltaire was still getting the Anti-Machiavel published in 1740!
* Man trinke mit seiner Geliebten ja auch keinen Kräutertee
I get the gist of this (it's what I said in my Peter Keith post about Fritz not having a high opinion of the political prowess of people he met socially), but what is this about herbal tea?
Re: Oster Wilhelmine readthrough - 1740s
Date: 2020-10-04 05:40 am (UTC)First of all: when did Wilhelmine's one and only visit to Rheinsberg (which coincided with the last time Fritz was there as far as I recall, after he was King already) happen? I just have a vague "early in his rule" memory, but that's covering anything between 1740 and the end of the first Silesian War.
As to why he didn't call her to Berlin straight away: honestly, I think it's for the Prince Hal/Henry V. reason. Everbody but everybody knew how close he and Wilhelmine had been throughout their childhood and adolescence. People also expected her to play a big role in his regime. (See Seckendorff the younger noting that SD might have miscalculated by dissing her daughter so much because Fritz, Seckendorff the younger thought, was going to resent that once he was King when Wilhelmine surely would be a major star at his court.) And remember that letter he wrote to Queen Caroline about how he'd never marry anyone but Princess Emily, one of the earliest things he apologized to FW for? (Not least because he could objectively see it had been a big mistake, no future monarch should tie himself down like this.) This letter, so said Fritz to several people and so Wilhelmine admits in her memoirs, had not only been written at Mom's urgings, but also Wilhelmine's. And because FW was so very publically angry about this, this was known to all and sunder as the example of Fritz politically influenced by women (tm), specifically, his mother and sister. Incidentally, bear also in mind the greater context. It's telling he wrote that letter to Caroline, not to Uncle George. Even in Prussia, they evidently knew Caroline was the brains of that operation. And while Reinette was not yet Louis XV's maitresse en titre, otherws were. In Russia, you had a Czarina on the throne. So: you have several major European powers dominated (in the public eye) by women, even when they were nominally ruled by men.
So I think Fritz, very set on remaking himself in the eyes of the public as der Einzige König, wanted to make it absolutely clear that no, he was NOT going to be influenced or dominated by anyone, including his favourite sister. Hence no immediate summonings. (Algarotti and Duhan were different - no one had expected them to exert any influence on him. People very much expected Wilhelmine to. Ergo: no summonings to make it clear she won't be the Power behind his Throne. Later visists, once he's won glory for himself and impressed everyone, are different, of course.
The saying actually is "ich wünschte, die Tage hätten mehr als 24 Stunden". I suspect the editor slipped up and didn't catch some leftout words.
Herbal tea: commonly associated with curing cold. You get doused with it by your doctors. Very sensible, not-well-tasting and unerotic. Note Fritz is casting Voltaire as his mistress there.
Re: Oster Wilhelmine readthrough - 1740s
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Date: 2020-10-04 03:17 am (UTC)Since I'm doing 20 pages with very little effort, and I'm not actually making myself do more than that,
All of which is to say, I'm no longer spending 100% of my free time on German, but I also don't want to lose my momentum, because I'm SO. CLOSE. But I'm so far that if I stop, what little command I do have will be gone before I know it.
So 30 pages tomorrow or you yell at me!
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Date: 2020-10-05 03:13 am (UTC)I admit I omitted her presence from Lovers, where she really should have been on Fritz's radar in the first chapter. The problem was that she's *so* important that it would have been hard to keep her from dominating the very specific story I wanted to tell, and she didn't fit into that set of parallels I was developing. But I gave her a starring role in the other fic!
Re: Oster Wilhelmine readthrough
Date: 2020-10-06 02:52 am (UTC)I read up through the end of the Italy trip. The Seven Years' War is coming, then death. :/
Re: Oster Wilhelmine readthrough
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