cahn | Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 21

From:

Replying here to Mildred's and Cahn's comments in the earlier post.

Water fountains as the big challenge to engineers: okay, this made me look up Herrenchiemsee, aka the palace Bavarian King Ludwig II. (yes, the one from Neuschwanstein, the Wagner fanboy) built in late imitation of Versailles. Turns out the waterworks were practically the only thing about it finished and working when he died. But given Herrenchiemsee is build on an island in the middle of the largest Bavarian lake - large as in nearly as large as American lakes - , the water supply was no problem!

Louis the patient, wry-humored in the endearing anecdotes: I think that's one reason why Louis XIV.' working schedule worked for Louis, and for none of his successors. He was a despot, but for all his love of opulence a hard-working one, and one able to submit himself to the micromanagement of his time and the incredible amount of etiquette he himself had created instead of freaking out and venting the pressure by making life hell for those serving him, or not working at all and making someone else do it.

From:

selenak

felis: while "to please me and my wife [...] in everything he does" is basically a set phrase, it's also literally impossible to accomplish later on. Poor kids.

Quite. It's telling of how little FW knew whom he was married to that the possibility that he and his wife might want different things from their children never occured to him. In fairness, now that I've read up on the simultanous Hannover family dysfunction: cousin G2 who was Hervey observes was quite similar to FW in many ways had a Queen who while presumably no more in love with her husband than SD was made it her policy to knock herself out to please him and change his mind via persuasion and manipulation, and she always presented a united front with the kids. Interestingly, FW's own mother, otoh, did clash with her husband's advisors early on, just like SD would later, but F1 didn't have the temperament for marital warfare, and ended up choosing her over the advisors.

funny enough, this whole part was then followed by a provision stating that if Fritz was disobedient, they (= Finkenstein and Kalkstein) should always threaten him with the Queen's reaction, never with FW's ("müssen sie Ihn mit [der Königin] alle Zeit schrecken, mit Mir aber niemahlen").

mildred_of_midgard: We have discussed how FW, in many respects, didn't understand child psychology, like, at all. And--surprise!--none of his children turned out as he intended.

cahn: Heh, this actually does seem to me that he kind of did understand the concept of good cop, bad cop? Only... it might have worked better if he had actually stuck to it and not in fact had all these over-the-top reactions that everyone was quite correctly scared of :P

I think what it comes down to is that what only child of his parents FW didn't understand that different children have different reactions, and also that if you want to play good cop, bad cop, with you as the good cop, you can't simultanously want to be thought of as the highest authority. I mean, a lot of fathers in biographies I've read pulled off the later smoothly, wether or not they intended it, by being the fun parent, with the others being stuck with the thankless role of disclipline-giving parent. This usually came with the fathers being absent a lot, though. FW, by contrast, made himself ever present in Fritz' life.

But seriously, the earlier point is key, imo. FW assumed Fritz would be just like him. He had hated having to learn Latin, Greek and Roman history, dancing etc. - let's not forget his mother's biography informed me Tiny Terror FW danced ballet in in public to his grandmother's delight! -, so he thought he'd spare his son(s) this and that they'd be happy about it and grateful, as he himself would have been. And when Fritz wasn't and loved just what FW had hated as a kid, it confused and hurt him, he started to feel rejected and responded badly, thereby starting a vicious circle. Whereas little AW responded positively to not having to learn Latin etc. and loved playing with guns and fireworks, so FW felt accepted and loved and started a positive cycle of affectionate reinforcement. (That AW actually didn't turn out like him at all, either, neither in temper nor inclinations, is another matter; he was able to blind himself about their very different attitudes to sex, for starters, by never finding out about them in his life time. And within FW's lifetime, all the kids still prayed, visited services and were careful not to show any scepticism, of course.)

felis: I've now started reading his correspondence with Duhan, which is very sweet so far.

I'm with Mildred: bring on the quotes! None of us has read it so far.

From:

felis

As I recall, Fritz tried to get him back, but couldn't, so a position with the in-laws was the best he could do until he inherited. Then Duhan and Algarotti got nearly verbatim "come quickly!" one-liners on June 3.

Ha, I knew there was a double of Algarotti's summons, but didn't remember it was Duhan. Also, I did a slight mental double-take at "in-laws" because I'd been thinking of it as "with his sister", since he repeatedly mentions her in the letters and took advantage of her visits to get them to Duhan safely. But either way, he seems to have been on good terms with the duke as well (not so much with the duchess). No idea how exactly he accomplished Duhan's change of living conditions, though, and who helped him with that, because going by his pre-1740 letters, it seems to have been quite risky to even write to him (see below).

In parallel with the French originals at Trier, I've been checking out this German edition of their correspondence from 1791, which itself is a translation of an earlier French edition. [With the result that the German translator writes opinionated footnotes about the French editor's strange opinions on Fritz.] Both Trier and this edition have the same 25 letters from Fritz (some of them rather short) and 2 letters from Duhan, so it's not very extensive. (The state archive seems to have two or three more from Duhan, but all from 1745, which makes me wonder if his pre-1740 letters might have been destroyed by Fritz for safety reasons. The book edition also includes the two versions of Duhan's eulogy, one written by Formey (I assume? if he was writing academy eulogies in 1745 already) and one by Fritz himself.)

The correspondence starts with an endearing one-liner you probably know, 15-year-old!Fritz's letter from 1727, when his education was deemed finished and they had to part ways: I promise you that, when I have my own money in hand, I will give you two thousand four hundred ecus annually, and I will always love you a little more than at this hour, if this is possible. [Signed "Frideric Pr.R. (L.S.)" and I have no idea what the L.S. stands for...]

After that, the letters are basically split in two halves, pre- and post-1740, with the post ones all written when Fritz was away during wartime, and mostly in 1745. As with other people, there's a tonal change, and particularly the 1745 letters are clingy "write me more often!" ones, so much so that I was a bit surprised, until Fritz mentioned that Jordan and Keyserlingk had just died, and I remembered that he was also on the outs with Wilhelmine and Voltaire during that time.

The 1730s letters are very affectionate, with lots of promises to do more for Duhan once he's able to, full of encouragement (it sounds like Duhan was struggling a bit in exile, possibly with depression), but also occasionally quite cryptic when referencing past events. Case in point, the marble quote in context, July 15th, 1733, because I have to admit, without Mildred's comment, I would not necessarily have made that connection:

It was not for want of will but of opportunity that I could not assure you, my dear, of my constant friendship. I purposely pass by the times when fate persecuted us both equally, and I believe that in these kinds of cases one must think of a happy future, and forget all that was disastrous and unfortunate in the past. However, my dear friend, I can assure you that your misfortunes have affected me more than my own; and since you know that when I am a friend, I am so truly, you can judge what I have suffered on your behalf. But let us break away from a matter as odious as it is distressing, and return to the present. You know my situation has changed a lot to my advantage; but you do not know, perhaps, that one cuts very deeply into marble, and that it always remains. I don't need to tell you more, because from there you can roughly understand the state of what concerns us. As far as I'm concerned, you can count on my esteem, my friendship, and my assistance. I still have the feelings towards you that I had of old. I hope that a time will come that will open up opportunities for me to prove this to you.
[...]
Attach yourself to the bearer of this letter, who is my very faithful friend.

No footnote telling me who the faithful friend was, unfortunately. But it shows that the letter writing had to happen secretly, which keeps being the case, so Charlotte becomes a go-between:

March 19th, 1734, written in Berlin: You know the risk you run when you can only do things while trembling. This is why I have only been able to answer you now, having a good opportunity through my sister. She will tell you everything I think about you. I am still the same, but similar to a mirror, which is obliged to mirror all the objects in front of it. I mean to say, not daring to be what nature made it, it is unfortunately subjected to the sad need to conform to the bizareness of the objects that present themselves --- --- I say too much, and I would say even more when speaking to a faithful friend, if I did not remember the principle of the wise man, who wants a seal to be put on his tongue. Farewell, my dear, until the time when I can see you again and speak to you without fear and without anxiety, and when I will reiterate to you the assurance of my perfect esteem, and how I am all yours.

October 2nd, 1736, he has things to say about Duhan vs. FW: Unless I have such sure opportunities as this, I don't dare to write to you. I hope you know me well enough not to suspect me of superficiality, nor to believe me capable of forgetting the gratitude I owe to a man of honor and integrity, who has employed all the wisdom of his mind to raise and educate me. I constantly remember the illustrious testimony that Alexander the Great gave to his teacher, in declaring that he was, in a certain sense, more indebted to him than to his father himself. I recognize myself as much inferior to this great prince, but I do not think it unworthy to imitate his good traits. So allow me, my dear Duhan, to tell you the same thing. My father only gave me life; are the talents of the mind not preferable?
[...]
I confess that I would very much like to see you again; but, knowing too well the disposition of minds, I can't flatter myself to have this satisfaction any time soon. When one indulges blindly in one's prejudices, and without examining things thoroughly, one is often prone to be seriously mistaken; hence most of the mistakes that men make. This is why it would be hoped that Father Malebranche's treatise 'The Search after Truth' was better known and read. Blood ties impose silence on me on a subject where I could explain myself more clearly, and where the subtle distinction between hating a bad deed and loving the one who commits it might vanish. These are the occasions when respect commands us to give bad things a twist that makes them less odious, and when charity wants us to paint the faults of the fellow man in the best colors we can.

March 13th, 1737 - Duhan's father has died and Fritz writes a condolence letter...

It is certain that the most severe tests, which we are obliged to pass in this world, are when we lose people forever who are dear to us. Constancy, steadfastness, and reason seem little help to us in these sad circumstances, and we only listen to our pain in these moments. I feel sorry for you with all my heart, seeing you in such a situation. [...] What is more common than being born and dying? However, we are always astonished at death, as if it were something foreign to us, and uncommon.
Console yourself, my dear Duhan, as best you can. Consider that there is a necessity which determines all events, and that it is impossible to fight what is resolved. We only make ourselves unhappy, without changing anything in our condition, and we spread bitterness over the happiest days of our life, the brevity of which should invite us not to grieve so much with unhappiness.
There is nothing more flattering to me than the confidence you show in me and the recourse you want to have in me. [...] How happy I would be if I could lessen your pain and find a proper balm to heal the wound this sorrow caused you! If my friendship can be of any help to you, please count on it and make use of the feelings I have for you.
We are about fifteen friends, retired here, who taste the pleasures of friendship and the sweetness of rest. It seems to me that I would be perfectly happy if you could come and join us in our solitude. We know no violent passions, and we only apply ourselves to making use of life. [...]

June 22nd, 1737, Fritz and his eternal enemy: ingratitude ;) - Ingratitude is a vice to which I feel an aversion of temperament, and I dare say, without hurting the laws of modesty, that gratitude has always been my favorite virtue.
May a happy fate join us, after a certain action [i.e. FW's death] has passed! I'm in your debt, and I'm dying to pay it off.

October 9th has the poem dedicated to Duhan, in which Fritz praises him as a mentor and as someone he should have listened to earlier instead of seeking pleasures in his youth, and then calls him his "seul père":
I owe you more, finally, than the author of my days:
He gave me life in his young love;
But he who teaches me, whose reason enlightens me,
He is my nurturer, and my only father.

February 10th, 1738, still secret letters, plus improving himself:
I neither could nor dared to answer your penultimate letter. All I can say about it is that the verses are charming, that they breathe freedom, playfulness and grace. If you write more, don't be stingy; send some fragments to me; but use my sister's intermediary, and do not risk any letter by post.
I am buried among books more than ever. I run after the time that I wasted so thoughtlessly in my youth, and I amass, as much as I can, a store of knowledge and truth. You will not condemn, I hope, the pains I am giving myself; they are a result of the knowledge that I have of myself. We must make up for all the faults of nature; we must take art for help, and draw even from the most remote antiquity to rectify what we find faulty in ourself.

The 1740 summons was quoted already, so let's skip to March 18th, 1744, from Breslau, Fritz keeps making good on his debts and his gratitude: You ask me what is your job as director of the Liegnitz Academy. It is to calmly draw your pension, to love me, and to enjoy yourself. These are duties which I hope you will not deny yourself, and which will be all the less painful to you as they are all that is required of you. Live happily in Berlin, dear Duhan, and enjoy, in age, the advantages owed to your merits, which fate denied you in your youth.

An example of the aforementioned 1745 letters, from Neisse: He starts with a poem lamenting Jordan and then says: I make no reparation to you, for you do not deserve it; and I will call you ungrateful, fickle and treacherous, until the moment when I will enjoy your pleasant company more often, and when I will see that, living in the same city, you will not live as if you were separated by a hundred miles from me. Jordan did not do so, and the friendship he had for me was sociable and bonding. I saw him every day, and when he was not sick, we lived together constantly.
Farewell, my dear Duhan; correct yourself, and become less sedentary.

September 24th, 1745, grieving Fritz: Think how unfortunate I am to have lost, almost at the same time, my poor Jordan and my dear Keyserlingk. They were my family, and I think I am now a widower, an orphan, and in a mourning of heart more dismal and more serious than that of black clothes.
[...]
Keep your health, and think that you are now almost the only old friend of mine I have left; and, if it doesn't ruin you on ink and paper, write to me more often. I will beg you again to be willing to accept errands for books and such things which I need sometimes. I believe my friends think like me, so I never dream of being able to bother them.

On the topic of errands, immediately after Soor - I'm completely plundered - he sends Duhan a list of the books he lost and asks him to send replacements, mostly from Jordan's library, which makes him cry over them in the next letter.

Nov 22nd, 1745, the first of the two available Duhan letters shows how religious he was, which kind of surprised me tbh (although it's kind of hard to judge tone when there are only two very short letters to go by):
Believing Your Majesty to be on the eve of some battle, I confess to him that I do not have enough peace of mind to write to him philosophically, as he had ordered me. My whole philosophy now consists in praying to God to lead YM, to protect him from any accident, and to grant him such advantages over his enemies, that they are obliged to ask him for peace. I am convinced, Sire, that YM implores with all his soul the assistance of his Creator, that he begs him to forgive the errors into which he may have fallen, and that, in a firm resolution to cling to him, YM will give his orders with his usual intrepidity, and will expect everything from heaven's blessing.
Forgive me, Sire, for the brevity of this letter. I will write to you as a philosopher when you are victorious; now I can only speak as a Christian [...]
The second one, Nov 30th, contains a couple of thoughts on glory and virtue, but [...] I will admit to him that I find it difficult to speak alone of morality while the world speaks only of your exploits; and further, would it be possible that YM was thinking of philosophy while taking on the Austrians?

Fritz' last letter is a response to that from December 7th, in which he ruminates on the topic Duhan mentioned:
[...] You are so laconic, my dear Duhan, in your morals, that you only indicate sentences on which the ignorant and I can write commentaries. [...] Among men of merit, the first are, without a doubt, those who do good for the love of good itself, who follow virtue and justice out of sentiment, and whose actions in life are the most consistent; and those of a lower order do great deeds out of vanity. Their virtue is less certain than that of the former: but, however impure this source may be, if the public good results from it, they can be granted a place among great men. Cato was of this first order, Cicero, of the second; so we see that the soul of the stoic is infinitely superior to the soul of the academician.
But I do not know why I amuse myself with giving you a great moral sermon, you, to whom I should only speak of the esteem which your virtue inspires in me, always equal and always certain. I hope to assure you of this soon myself, when, once heaven allows me to end the horrors of war, I may, in the bosom of my homeland and my family, enjoy the sweetness of company with my friends, and give the sciences the moments that I do not owe to the state.
Farewell, dear Duhan: be sure that I love you with all my heart.

And then Duhan died not even a month later. :(

From:

felis

... because I just stumbled across him while looking for something else! (previous thread)

a) Fritz mentions him in passing in a letter to Wilhelmine from December 15th, 1732, where he gives a list of people he dines with, and calls him "a harlequin by nature and a fop by profession".

b) I should have read both the editor's notes and the bibliographical notes at Trier, because the latter have a link to an uncensored version of both letters, provided by Volz, and while I have a hard time understanding some of it (unknown words and references + Fritz orthography + verse + blackletters = ???), I do see why they were extensively censored: lots of profanity. Like: Fritz accuses v.d.Groeben of sitting at home and lousing his "hosenbeutel" and I don't know if he means his bottom or his balls or something less personal, but he certainly tells him that "thunder should drive sideways into your arse with barbed hooks, for you devil are sitting at home and hatching your hen's eggs". (That last expression just means that he's lazy I think, because I seem to dimly remember hearing it used even in my time?) There's more in the uncensored poem, but, see above, comprehension problems.
But, on a less sweary note, he also tells him that he's lucky because he's getting enough to eat and because there's dysentery going around in the camp. And he sends him fruit and dice and possibly a (snuff?)box filled with contraband(?) ("so you don't forget me").

As for the editor's notes: Preuss and Volz can't seem to agree on much, not even the guy's name - Johann Heinrich (Preuss, which fits the state archive) vs. Joachim Heinrich (Volz, which might make him the brother of the wiki guy Mildred linked, with a 1705 birthdate and a 1738 marriage) - but they both say that he was first ensign (at the time of the letter to Wilhelmine) and then lieutenant in Fritz' regiment, and transfered to the hussars in 1738. (Preuss says he was thirty-four at the time, so it seems that he was definitely years older than Fritz.)

Preuss' footnotes also led me to two other anecdotes about him, one in Büsching p. 20 - some questionable "pranks" on preachers and their wives played by Fritz and him - and a Fritz letter to Grumbkow in 1733, where von der Groeben apparently almost got into a fistfight with a woman - Preuss says Wolden's wife - because he bothered her with his smoking, she started to insult him, he insulted back, and then "a fight of the amazons" almost broke out, except her husband intervened and the combatants made peace by drinking.

... I guess now we know why Fritz called him a devil!? (Although in this particular case, he actually called her a female one.)

From:

prinzsorgenfrei

Uni hit me like a freight train, every professor wants some presentation or essay as proof that I'm not sleeping in their Zoom lectures and drawing in perspective is hard, so my illustrations aren't working, but one thing is working out: Copying stuff.
So I copied one of my favorite portraits of Wilhelmine because who would deserve a spot on my wall more than her? :D And oh, the difference a familiar medium (colored pencils, in this case) can make.

images

My phone camera makes the texture look 10 times more rough than it is and there are some flaws, but I'm satisfied with the overall result :D She's now officially the prettiest person of the lineup so far.

From:

prinzsorgenfrei

It's what it says on the tin, I made another one. And I crossed something off the request list! Did I just do it to chicken out of drawing a proper monkey? Quite possibly! But I honestly feel like this style fit the situation :'D This kind of reminds me of my Keeping up with the Hohenzollerns days.

Here you go:
images

Also thank you very much for your kind comments on Wilhelmine :D She's honestly the best that came out of this month, artistically.

From:

prinzsorgenfrei

In a fit of procrastination-productivity I dug out my unopened oil paint and my free sample painting paper and tried some stuff. What happened was Katte because the piece of paper was rather small and there's this one closeup of his face that I could use as a reference.

Overall I liked it a lot better than the acrylic paint I used for poor Fredersdorf, so I might paint over that one at some point... Give him Face #4 :'D
The fact that oil paint takes ages to dry was a blessing and a curse and I definitely need to get used to working dark to light and not putting my hand onto the canvas (there's black paint all over everything I love). The result, like Fredersdorf, has its problems (we do not talk about the left side of his face) but I like it well enought so far ^^

images

From:

cahn

Sorry, I completely messed this up and it occurred to me that some people might still be tracking this post instead -- since we were already having Frederician fic discussion in the post I made a couple of days ago, I just turned that one into the new discussion post, so conversation is taking place there. :)

https://cahn.dreamwidth.org/181432.html

Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 21

Page Summary

Active Entries

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags