I tentatively suggest Fritz might have been aware that Katte wasn't a deist, let alone an atheist, but was in fact despite liking French philosophers serious about his Protestantism, and claiming that the two most powerful schemers at court who had his father's ear most of the time were trying to set him up for marriage (and thus Catholic conversion) with a Habsburg would work as an argument in his favor with Katte. Either way, I don't think I've ever seen fanfic or profic tackling the (very likely) fact that Fritz lied to Katte in 1730 in order to get him to agree to the escape plan.
I realize you must have said this before (that Fritz most likely lied to Katte) and yet this must have been long enough ago that I didn't know enough to be shocked, and now I'm shocked :P :)
...I am frankly shocked that mildred has not yet replied to this (probably because she has super RL going on but also is planning an epic detective dive in the future) but wow, a) this had never occurred to me because I got imprinted by "Pulvis et Umbra," in which Katte is definitely not Protestant, but b) I do sort of feel like this would explain some of Katte's last letter -- I mean, obviously he was hoping for clemency from FW, and of course that may even have been most of it, but it does read to me a little like he might actually have believed some of what he was saying with the religious stuff...
I, uh, want this fanfic that goes into Fritz lying to Katte, which I know mildred will object to, but perhaps she can be content with the fact that this would actually help me ship it :P (yeah, selenak is a mean writer, I'm a mean reader *hides*)
Since the Imperial Court seems no longer to want the Duke of Lorraine and no other suitable Catholic prince is available, said court could not make a better choice than to connect itself with a House which practices in its own territory complete religious toleration, and if England, which is inseparable from the United Netherlands, connects itself through marriage with the Princess of Prussia, then his Royal Highness believes the Pragmatic Sanction of the Emperor to be firm enough that no one would have to worry about possible contradictions.
That's, uh. Something!
and that he hates everything which includes effort and work
I... was looking for something else in salon recently and ended up rereading a comment thread about how Fritz basically worked up until the day he died. Following his father's example. This all makes me very sad :(
4. finally, he believes that anything that gives him, the King, the slightest bit of joy is bound to be repellent to the Crown Prince.
FW *headdesk*
Once more, I feel completely justified in the first of my Fritz/MT AUs. :)
I realize you must have said this before (that Fritz most likely lied to Katte) and yet this must have been long enough ago that I didn't know enough to be shocked, and now I'm shocked :P :)
It came up when I found out myself, i.e. when I translated and summarized the Katte and Fritz 1730 interrogation protocols for the salon. Because while their stories mostly match, this is the big, big contradiction, with Katte saying Fritz told him Grumbkow and Seckendorff were trying to pressure him to marry an archduchess and convert, Fritz denying that he said this, and Katte, when he was asked again, insisting that it was true. Like I said, in theory, this could also be explained by Katte inventing the story on the spot in the hope that it would make arch Protestant FW look more kindly on his son's motives to flee (and Katte's own help). But given he says nothing else in all these interrogations that can be disproved (as I recall, he sometimes omits stuff which later comes up in the first few interrogations, but he doesn't say X happened only to be proven wrong later), and given that between the two of them, one had to learn to lie from early childhood onwards as a survival mechanism, and it wasn't Katte, I'm left with the conclusion that yes, Fritz point blank lied to Katte in 1730 as part of his effort to get him to agree to the escape plan.
/ETA: Also, it's telling that Fritz - who otherwise goes out of his way to protect Katte in the interrogations, confirming that the whole escape idea had been his idea, that Katte had tried to talk him out of it etc. - when asked about this contradiction can't come up with something less lame than "He must be misremembering", and doesn't even attempt to say "oh yeah, that totally happened!" himself, presumably because he knows there's no way FW is going to buy that. Not because FW is such a good judge of character, but because G & S know how hardcore Protestant he is, and to attempt a scheme that even smells of Catholic conversion for the next King of Prussia would be shooting themselves in the foot massively. (Note that Fritz suggests it to Grumbkow a few months later, he offers giving up on the succession in AW's favor if he gets to be Archduke and Emperor with MT, thus avoiding the situation of a Catholic Prussian King. Mind you, I entirely agree with Mildred that if the marriage had happened, AW would have found out that Fritz renounces that stepping aside from the succession as soon as FW has breathed his last breath, but that's not relevant to the Katte situation.)/end ETA/
re: the religious aspect, Mildred did change her mind here (due to Hans heinrich mentioning in his letters that Hans Herrmann asked him to send younger brother Albrecht to Halle so he can be educated as a good Protestant).
I, uh, want this fanfic that goes into Fritz lying to Katte, which I know mildred will object to, but perhaps she can be content with the fact that this would actually help me ship it :P (yeah, [personal profile] selenak is a mean writer, I'm a mean reader *hides*)
It says something about both of us that this is the first plot kernel that could lead to me to write something Fritz/Katte focused (as opposed to having Fritz/Katte as an emotional brackground ship, which it is in several of my stories) and you to read it. :)
his Royal Highness believes the Pragmatic Sanction of the Emperor to be firm enough that no one would have to worry about possible contradictions.
That's, uh. Something!
I know. :)
Fritz: Well, if I had married MT, then of course the Pragmatic Sanction would have been upheld. With me as Emperor.
I... was looking for something else in salon recently and ended up rereading a comment thread about how Fritz basically worked up until the day he died. Following his father's example. This all makes me very sad :(
It is very sad. Looking for a "well done, son" until he breathed his last breath, plus he had internalized the Protestant Work Ethic (minus the Protestant part) a long time ago by then. (Mind you, Catholic MT also worked until her three-days-death began, and she had not had a workoholic parent, but there were other emotional issues at play there.)
(Cardinal Richelieu: Excuse me. I, too, worked until I died. It's a thing that comes with being a smart and energetic autocratic despot, independent of religous affiliation.)
between the two of them, one had to learn to lie from early childhood onwards as a survival mechanism, and it wasn't Katte
Hard agree. This is one thing that skews me toward believing Fritz is the liar in the interrogation protocols, which is what leads me to the conclusion that Katte was sincere at the end.
Mildred did change her mind here (due to Hans heinrich mentioning in his letters that Hans Herrmann asked him to send younger brother Albrecht to Halle so he can be educated as a good Protestant).
Yes, because while atheists/deists/skeptics of all flavors are much more likely to pretend to be religious than pious people to pretend to be atheists, when the stakes are high, Katte has no ulterior motive to encourage the propagation of a religion he doesn't believe in after he's dead. A really committed atheist like Diderot would object on principle, and even someone who was just questioning wouldn't have an especially strong motive to go out of their way to encourage their younger brother to be indoctrinated in the true faith. (Technically, they might if they were absolutely agnostic and having an existential crisis and wanted to spare younger brother that, but we have no evidence for that for Katte, and an abundance of evidence he has sincerely found his way back to his childhood religion and is glad of it because it's helping him hold it together while he approaches his execution.)
And as I said even when I thought Katte might not have been sincere: this was probably one driver (of several) behind Fritz's oft-repeated conviction that Voltaire was going to recant on his deathbed.
It says something about both of us that this is the first plot kernel that could lead to me to write something Fritz/Katte focused (as opposed to having Fritz/Katte as an emotional brackground ship, which it is in several of my stories) and you to read it. :)
It says something about me that my first reaction was "I can just totally ignore the Hans Heinrich letter, it's obscure and doesn't count," though again, not because of Fritz's lying but because of Katte's sincerity. (Lol, look--if my faves weren't problematic, they wouldn't be my faves! That's true of every fave in every fandom in my entire life.)
It is very sad. Looking for a "well done, son" until he breathed his last breath, plus he had internalized the Protestant Work Ethic (minus the Protestant part) a long time ago by then.
...I am frankly shocked that mildred has not yet replied to this (probably because she has super RL going on but also is planning an epic detective dive in the future)
Lol, well, not a detective dive, but I have a lot to say, obviously!
In a nutshell, yes, as Selena correctly points out, I had changed my mind about Katte's last days, based on the Hans Heinrich letter; and though I didn't say so at the time, as soon as I read that letter, I had the same thought Selena did: "Oh, *that*'s why Fritz lied to Katte about G & S plotting to marry him to an Austrian archduchess!" I've been thinking about this for a while now, in other words.
Selena, I think the reason nobody has tackled that in fanfic or profic is that I don't think anyone's picked up on it in nonfiction! You're the first person I've seen address it, and you got it from examining the primary sources.
I agree that I no longer think there's a reasonable possibility that Katte made it up; Fritz was lying to his boyfriend to try to get him to help with the escape attempt. Good lord.
I realize you must have said this before (that Fritz most likely lied to Katte) and yet this must have been long enough ago that I didn't know enough to be shocked, and now I'm shocked :P :)
As Selena noted, this was from when she was reading Hinrichs' collected protocols of the 1730 trial for us, so back circa April of last year. (Actually, come to think of it, I might have spotted it first in Koser? But then the primary source turned up in Hinrichs.) We kind of went WTF at Katte insisting that Grumbkow and Seckendorff had this conspiracy to marry Fritz to a Catholic princess and Fritz, put on the spot, not being able to come up with anything better than, "What? Who said that? I never said that!" To which Katte, when questioned again, said Fritz *absolutely* said that. That was the one place where their stories diverged, and also the one where Fritz couldn't come up with a clever answer.
We couldn't decide if Katte was trying to excuse Fritz to FW, or Fritz had lied to Katte to get him to agree to the escape, or there had been a misunderstanding, or what. We had this exchange:
mildred_of_midgard: Katte brought the supposed plot up himself, in his interrogation. This means he 1) believed it (which shows how well he knew the scheming duo, but okay), 2) thought it was bad enough to justify running away, even in the eyes of FW. Fritz is also testifying, apparently independently of Katte, that Katte tried to prevent him from leaving. So the supposed plot might have been what changed Katte's mind. (Which, incidentally, tells you something about Katte and his feelings about Catholicism.)
selenak: Indeed it does. If to you converting to Catholicism (even to become Emperor) = Fate worse than steady paternal abuse is, then you're just this side of Oliver Cromwell in your feelings re: the Church of Rome.
And that bugged me, because it didn't jive with my picture of Katte. Until I read the Hans Heinrich letters. And then it made sense. And now I have to assume that Fritz lied, presumably because he was getting resistance from Katte on escaping, and Katte's religious fervor at the end was not only sincere but based on strong feelings before that fact.
It also suggests that the reason Fritz couldn't come up with a clever answer when put on the spot at the trial was that he wasn't expecting this lie to come back and bite him. He may have blurted it out to Katte and forgotten he even said it? At any rate, it clearly didn't figure in his actual motives for escaping, so I can see why he had an "Oh shit" moment when they brought it up at the interrogation. Because as Selena points out, he's so consistently trying to exonerate Katte during the whole process, even before Katte's arrested. Starting with that very first conversation with Seckendorff, before Keith's disappearance was even noticed and the whole thing exploded into a conspiracy in FW's mind.
a) this had never occurred to me because I got imprinted by "Pulvis et Umbra," in which Katte is definitely not Protestant
Ah, ah! I actually deliberately left it ambiguous, because even then I conceded that didn't *know* whether Katte died with the fervor of a convert or was trying to appease FW. I actually gave it 50/50 in terms of what we know in real life. (My headcanon being something entirely different from my commitment to methodology as a scholar.) The entire fic as well as the dialogue is carefully constructed to make it open to both interpretations.
...But yeah, it is heavily skewed to direct you toward my personal preference, which is why you remember it that way. :P (The alternate interpretation was mostly there as a concession to my awareness that I might be wrong.)
But what I now have to say is actually completely wrong about that fic, is that in that fic Katte is definitely not a Protestant in Fritz's mind. Whereas now I have to conclude, based on Fritz lying to him, that Fritz knew full well that Katte was a Protestant at some level (possibly a questioning one, but clearly one biased against Catholics. Remember that Fritz is a deist in later life, and considers all religions delusions, but yet manages to be anti-Semitic because he's absorbed the biases of his Christian society; Katte might have done the same with Catholicism in his Protestant upbringing).
So yeah, sorry for imprinting you before salon had read All The Things. :P
I do sort of feel like this would explain some of Katte's last letter -
Well, considering it was not only composed by a preacher *and* in his handwriting, I was willing to write it off, but given the Hans Heinrich letters, I have to conclude the letter also isn't the complete fake I was hoping for.
I, uh, want this fanfic that goes into Fritz lying to Katte, which I know mildred will object to, but perhaps she can be content with the fact that this would actually help me ship it :P (yeah, [personal profile] selenak is a mean writer, I'm a mean reader *hides*)
So here I am to surprise you: I'm actually cool with that part! Fritz being a lying liar who lies is part of the reason I love him so much. It breaks my *heart* that he had to lie to get help, but we already knew he was getting so desperate and coming up with more and more wild ideas to escape because he wasn't getting support from the people closest to him. (Peter Keith is the last remaining candidate for someone who *might* have supported him from the beginning.)
But a story where Fritz has to lie to Katte is not a problem for me. (I've actually written snippets where Katte is trying to talk Fritz into staying, and I don't blame him for that nor Fritz for lying.)
The problem for me is Katte's final hours not being a masquerade for his and Fritz's fathers' benefit. I LIKED my headcanon!
I find masquerading (in any form, for any reason) far more interesting than sincere piety. This is why I find myself much more drawn to the deist "defender of the Protestant faith" having texts read in the church about not suffering a woman to lead, than to the actual pious woman who was doing the leading. (Not the misogyny; that part isn't attractive. But the hypocrisy--I love trickster figures.)
And I loved the thought that Katte was doing this *to protect Fritz*! That gave me so many feels.
I much preferred him having ulterior motives to being sincere. I've been grumbling ever since I read the Hans Heinrich letters and trying to figure out what to do about it.
Especially because part of "fix-it fic where they all escape to France and decide to stay there" is having to convert to at least nominal Catholicism. And I had Katte being all chill about it.
But maybe I can make it work by going with a headcanon according to which he's extremely questioning before his time in prison and death sentence, at which point he jumps back into the Protestant fold with a vengeance (there are atheists in foxholes, but I have to conclude Katte was not one), but has absorbed *societal* biases about the evils of Catholicism, like Fritz's anti-Semitism (and let's be real, probably Katte's unattested anti-Semitism as well :/).
So he puts up more resistance, but Fritz wins him over in the end, just like he did with the escape attempt.
Once more, I feel completely justified in the first of my Fritz/MT AUs. :)
Heeee! Well, yes :)
Yes, yes, yours are more justified than mine. :P
I... was looking for something else in salon recently and ended up rereading a comment thread about how Fritz basically worked up until the day he died. Following his father's example. This all makes me very sad :(
Yeah. If it's any comfort, he credited Wilhelmine with teaching him to love not only learning but work? But yeah, his father's example loomed large as well.
Not sure if this counts as comfort, I agree with Krockow that a lot of Fritz's inability to stop *doing things*, whatever things they were (work/studying/conversation/music/poetry), for five minutes, was driven by his inability to be alone with his thoughts, due to depression/PTSD. So it wasn't all FW's example? At any rate, it's bittersweet to me that he was able to keep working up till the very end.
That was the one place where their stories diverged, and also the one where Fritz couldn't come up with a clever answer.
Ahhhh okay! And ha, yeah, I can see you guys talked about it but I can also see that I just didn't know enough to be able to absorb everything properly :)
The entire fic as well as the dialogue is carefully constructed to make it open to both interpretations.
...But yeah, it is heavily skewed to direct you toward my personal preference, which is why you remember it that way. :P
Ha! Yes, all right, I see that now. But yes, given that those bits are wholly in Fritz's POV... :P
So yeah, sorry for imprinting you before salon had read All The Things. :P
:)
I find masquerading (in any form, for any reason) far more interesting than sincere piety.
Not gonna lie, I read this sentence and my brain was like VOLTAIRE! :D But anyway, I find both interesting but in different ways, and they appeal to different parts of my psyche. Masquerading is certainly more intellectually interesting and stimulating to me, deist "defender of the Protestant faith" having texts read in the church about not suffering a woman to lead makes me laugh, lol, and sincere piety can easily be boring (I must reluctantly concede that I actually don't want fic about EC), but sometimes piety can be interesting.
Though in MT's case I think a large part of why I glommed onto her was not particularly her piety but because it was such a relief to find someone in this fandom who was from a vaguely-functional family (although I suppose she had her own problems, and she managed to mess up her kids a fair amount, at least they weren't... Hohenzollern problems).
So it wasn't all FW's example? At any rate, it's bittersweet to me that he was able to keep working up till the very end.
Yeah, I know we talked about this before a bit... But it just breaks my heart that FW was like "what a lazy kid I have" and, like, NO!
Not gonna lie, I read this sentence and my brain was like VOLTAIRE!
Not gonna lie, I had Voltaire on the brain when I wrote this! He went to Mass any number of times.
sometimes piety can be interesting.
I agree that it can be, but it's *generally* less interesting to me than cunning plans and ulterior motives, and certainly in this case. Which is why I'm disappointed and leaning toward ignoring the Hans Heinrich letters wherever possible. :P Or at least working around them.
Though in MT's case I think a large part of why I glommed onto her was not particularly her piety but because it was such a relief to find someone in this fandom who was from a vaguely-functional family (although I suppose she had her own problems, and she managed to mess up her kids a fair amount, at least they weren't... Hohenzollern problems).
What MT feels I do have are largely focused on her being a TERRIER. She has many other good traits, such as correcting her husband' spelling and snarking at Fritz's dirty laundry, total respect there. :P
Yeah, I know we talked about this before a bit... But it just breaks my heart that FW was like "what a lazy kid I have" and, like, NO!
I KNOW, RIGHT? He didn't know his kids, like, at all. Not even AW, clearly. :/
Ha! Yes, all right, I see that now. But yes, given that those bits are wholly in Fritz's POV... :P
Yeah, I was definitely wrong about Fritz's perspective on Katte's sincerity. I was drawing on his "it's easy to compel someone to profess religious beliefs, but you gain nothing from the empty words" quote, instead of the interrogation protocols about which I did not know yet.
But I totally left the fic ambiguous as to whether it's a ghost visitation or a fever/opium dream (even the tags!), and as you saw, I call out the ambiguity in that exchange by having Fritz say, "I knew it!" and Katte go, "I'm your dream. I am as you remember me." :P
And then, even waffling like that, I *still* managed to be wrong! GDI. :P
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timeasmymeasure
Re: Austrian marriage plans
Date: 2021-02-17 05:57 am (UTC)I realize you must have said this before (that Fritz most likely lied to Katte) and yet this must have been long enough ago that I didn't know enough to be shocked, and now I'm shocked :P :)
...I am frankly shocked that mildred has not yet replied to this (probably because she has super RL going on but also is planning an epic detective dive in the future) but wow, a) this had never occurred to me because I got imprinted by "Pulvis et Umbra," in which Katte is definitely not Protestant, but b) I do sort of feel like this would explain some of Katte's last letter -- I mean, obviously he was hoping for clemency from FW, and of course that may even have been most of it, but it does read to me a little like he might actually have believed some of what he was saying with the religious stuff...
I, uh, want this fanfic that goes into Fritz lying to Katte, which I know mildred will object to, but perhaps she can be content with the fact that this would actually help me ship it :P (yeah,
Since the Imperial Court seems no longer to want the Duke of Lorraine and no other suitable Catholic prince is available, said court could not make a better choice than to connect itself with a House which practices in its own territory complete religious toleration, and if England, which is inseparable from the United Netherlands, connects itself through marriage with the Princess of Prussia, then his Royal Highness believes the Pragmatic Sanction of the Emperor to be firm enough that no one would have to worry about possible contradictions.
That's, uh. Something!
and that he hates everything which includes effort and work
I... was looking for something else in salon recently and ended up rereading a comment thread about how Fritz basically worked up until the day he died. Following his father's example. This all makes me very sad :(
4. finally, he believes that anything that gives him, the King, the slightest bit of joy is bound to be repellent to the Crown Prince.
FW *headdesk*
Once more, I feel completely justified in the first of my Fritz/MT AUs. :)
Heeee! Well, yes :)
Re: Austrian marriage plans
Date: 2021-02-17 06:34 am (UTC)It came up when I found out myself, i.e. when I translated and summarized the Katte and Fritz 1730 interrogation protocols for the salon. Because while their stories mostly match, this is the big, big contradiction, with Katte saying Fritz told him Grumbkow and Seckendorff were trying to pressure him to marry an archduchess and convert, Fritz denying that he said this, and Katte, when he was asked again, insisting that it was true. Like I said, in theory, this could also be explained by Katte inventing the story on the spot in the hope that it would make arch Protestant FW look more kindly on his son's motives to flee (and Katte's own help). But given he says nothing else in all these interrogations that can be disproved (as I recall, he sometimes omits stuff which later comes up in the first few interrogations, but he doesn't say X happened only to be proven wrong later), and given that between the two of them, one had to learn to lie from early childhood onwards as a survival mechanism, and it wasn't Katte, I'm left with the conclusion that yes, Fritz point blank lied to Katte in 1730 as part of his effort to get him to agree to the escape plan.
/ETA: Also, it's telling that Fritz - who otherwise goes out of his way to protect Katte in the interrogations, confirming that the whole escape idea had been his idea, that Katte had tried to talk him out of it etc. - when asked about this contradiction can't come up with something less lame than "He must be misremembering", and doesn't even attempt to say "oh yeah, that totally happened!" himself, presumably because he knows there's no way FW is going to buy that. Not because FW is such a good judge of character, but because G & S know how hardcore Protestant he is, and to attempt a scheme that even smells of Catholic conversion for the next King of Prussia would be shooting themselves in the foot massively. (Note that Fritz suggests it to Grumbkow a few months later, he offers giving up on the succession in AW's favor if he gets to be Archduke and Emperor with MT, thus avoiding the situation of a Catholic Prussian King. Mind you, I entirely agree with Mildred that if the marriage had happened, AW would have found out that Fritz renounces that stepping aside from the succession as soon as FW has breathed his last breath, but that's not relevant to the Katte situation.)/end ETA/
re: the religious aspect, Mildred did change her mind here (due to Hans heinrich mentioning in his letters that Hans Herrmann asked him to send younger brother Albrecht to Halle so he can be educated as a good Protestant).
I, uh, want this fanfic that goes into Fritz lying to Katte, which I know mildred will object to, but perhaps she can be content with the fact that this would actually help me ship it :P (yeah, [personal profile] selenak is a mean writer, I'm a mean reader *hides*)
It says something about both of us that this is the first plot kernel that could lead to me to write something Fritz/Katte focused (as opposed to having Fritz/Katte as an emotional brackground ship, which it is in several of my stories) and you to read it. :)
his Royal Highness believes the Pragmatic Sanction of the Emperor to be firm enough that no one would have to worry about possible contradictions.
That's, uh. Something!
I know. :)
Fritz: Well, if I had married MT, then of course the Pragmatic Sanction would have been upheld. With me as Emperor.
I... was looking for something else in salon recently and ended up rereading a comment thread about how Fritz basically worked up until the day he died. Following his father's example. This all makes me very sad :(
It is very sad. Looking for a "well done, son" until he breathed his last breath, plus he had internalized the Protestant Work Ethic (minus the Protestant part) a long time ago by then.
(Mind you, Catholic MT also worked until her three-days-death began, and she had not had a workoholic parent, but there were other emotional issues at play there.)
(Cardinal Richelieu: Excuse me. I, too, worked until I died. It's a thing that comes with being a smart and energetic autocratic despot, independent of religous affiliation.)
Re: Austrian marriage plans
Date: 2021-02-20 06:04 pm (UTC)Hard agree. This is one thing that skews me toward believing Fritz is the liar in the interrogation protocols, which is what leads me to the conclusion that Katte was sincere at the end.
Mildred did change her mind here (due to Hans heinrich mentioning in his letters that Hans Herrmann asked him to send younger brother Albrecht to Halle so he can be educated as a good Protestant).
Yes, because while atheists/deists/skeptics of all flavors are much more likely to pretend to be religious than pious people to pretend to be atheists, when the stakes are high, Katte has no ulterior motive to encourage the propagation of a religion he doesn't believe in after he's dead. A really committed atheist like Diderot would object on principle, and even someone who was just questioning wouldn't have an especially strong motive to go out of their way to encourage their younger brother to be indoctrinated in the true faith. (Technically, they might if they were absolutely agnostic and having an existential crisis and wanted to spare younger brother that, but we have no evidence for that for Katte, and an abundance of evidence he has sincerely found his way back to his childhood religion and is glad of it
because it's helping him hold it together while he approaches his execution.)And as I said even when I thought Katte might not have been sincere: this was probably one driver (of several) behind Fritz's oft-repeated conviction that Voltaire was going to recant on his deathbed.
It says something about both of us that this is the first plot kernel that could lead to me to write something Fritz/Katte focused (as opposed to having Fritz/Katte as an emotional brackground ship, which it is in several of my stories) and you to read it. :)
It says something about me that my first reaction was "I can just totally ignore the Hans Heinrich letter, it's obscure and doesn't count," though again, not because of Fritz's lying but because of Katte's sincerity. (Lol, look--if my faves weren't problematic, they wouldn't be my faves! That's true of every fave in every fandom in my entire life.)
It is very sad. Looking for a "well done, son" until he breathed his last breath, plus he had internalized the Protestant Work Ethic (minus the Protestant part) a long time ago by then.
Yeah. :/
Re: Austrian marriage plans
Date: 2021-02-17 01:30 pm (UTC)Lol, well, not a detective dive, but I have a lot to say, obviously!
In a nutshell, yes, as Selena correctly points out, I had changed my mind about Katte's last days, based on the Hans Heinrich letter; and though I didn't say so at the time, as soon as I read that letter, I had the same thought Selena did: "Oh, *that*'s why Fritz lied to Katte about G & S plotting to marry him to an Austrian archduchess!" I've been thinking about this for a while now, in other words.
Selena, I think the reason nobody has tackled that in fanfic or profic is that I don't think anyone's picked up on it in nonfiction! You're the first person I've seen address it, and you got it from examining the primary sources.
I agree that I no longer think there's a reasonable possibility that Katte made it up; Fritz was lying to his boyfriend to try to get him to help with the escape attempt. Good lord.
More hopefully by this weekend!
Re: Austrian marriage plans
Date: 2021-02-20 05:52 pm (UTC)As Selena noted, this was from when she was reading Hinrichs' collected protocols of the 1730 trial for us, so back circa April of last year. (Actually, come to think of it, I might have spotted it first in Koser? But then the primary source turned up in Hinrichs.) We kind of went WTF at Katte insisting that Grumbkow and Seckendorff had this conspiracy to marry Fritz to a Catholic princess and Fritz, put on the spot, not being able to come up with anything better than, "What? Who said that? I never said that!" To which Katte, when questioned again, said Fritz *absolutely* said that. That was the one place where their stories diverged, and also the one where Fritz couldn't come up with a clever answer.
We couldn't decide if Katte was trying to excuse Fritz to FW, or Fritz had lied to Katte to get him to agree to the escape, or there had been a misunderstanding, or what. We had this exchange:
And that bugged me, because it didn't jive with my picture of Katte. Until I read the Hans Heinrich letters. And then it made sense. And now I have to assume that Fritz lied, presumably because he was getting resistance from Katte on escaping, and Katte's religious fervor at the end was not only sincere but based on strong feelings before that fact.
It also suggests that the reason Fritz couldn't come up with a clever answer when put on the spot at the trial was that he wasn't expecting this lie to come back and bite him. He may have blurted it out to Katte and forgotten he even said it? At any rate, it clearly didn't figure in his actual motives for escaping, so I can see why he had an "Oh shit" moment when they brought it up at the interrogation. Because as Selena points out, he's so consistently trying to exonerate Katte during the whole process, even before Katte's arrested. Starting with that very first conversation with Seckendorff, before Keith's disappearance was even noticed and the whole thing exploded into a conspiracy in FW's mind.
a) this had never occurred to me because I got imprinted by "Pulvis et Umbra," in which Katte is definitely not Protestant
Ah, ah! I actually deliberately left it ambiguous, because even then I conceded that didn't *know* whether Katte died with the fervor of a convert or was trying to appease FW. I actually gave it 50/50 in terms of what we know in real life. (My headcanon being something entirely different from my commitment to methodology as a scholar.) The entire fic as well as the dialogue is carefully constructed to make it open to both interpretations.
...But yeah, it is heavily skewed to direct you toward my personal preference, which is why you remember it that way. :P (The alternate interpretation was mostly there as a concession to my awareness that I might be wrong.)
But what I now have to say is actually completely wrong about that fic, is that in that fic Katte is definitely not a Protestant in Fritz's mind. Whereas now I have to conclude, based on Fritz lying to him, that Fritz knew full well that Katte was a Protestant at some level (possibly a questioning one, but clearly one biased against Catholics. Remember that Fritz is a deist in later life, and considers all religions delusions, but yet manages to be anti-Semitic because he's absorbed the biases of his Christian society; Katte might have done the same with Catholicism in his Protestant upbringing).
So yeah, sorry for imprinting you before salon had read All The Things. :P
I do sort of feel like this would explain some of Katte's last letter -
Well, considering it was not only composed by a preacher *and* in his handwriting, I was willing to write it off, but given the Hans Heinrich letters, I have to conclude the letter also isn't the complete fake I was hoping for.
I, uh, want this fanfic that goes into Fritz lying to Katte, which I know mildred will object to, but perhaps she can be content with the fact that this would actually help me ship it :P (yeah, [personal profile] selenak is a mean writer, I'm a mean reader *hides*)
So here I am to surprise you: I'm actually cool with that part! Fritz being a lying liar who lies is part of the reason I love him so much. It breaks my *heart* that he had to lie to get help, but we already knew he was getting so desperate and coming up with more and more wild ideas to escape because he wasn't getting support from the people closest to him. (Peter Keith is the last remaining candidate for someone who *might* have supported him from the beginning.)
But a story where Fritz has to lie to Katte is not a problem for me. (I've actually written snippets where Katte is trying to talk Fritz into staying, and I don't blame him for that nor Fritz for lying.)
The problem for me is Katte's final hours not being a masquerade for his and Fritz's fathers' benefit. I LIKED my headcanon!
I find masquerading (in any form, for any reason) far more interesting than sincere piety. This is why I find myself much more drawn to the deist "defender of the Protestant faith" having texts read in the church about not suffering a woman to lead, than to the actual pious woman who was doing the leading. (Not the misogyny; that part isn't attractive. But the hypocrisy--I love trickster figures.)
And I loved the thought that Katte was doing this *to protect Fritz*! That gave me so many feels.
I much preferred him having ulterior motives to being sincere. I've been grumbling ever since I read the Hans Heinrich letters and trying to figure out what to do about it.
Especially because part of "fix-it fic where they all escape to France and decide to stay there" is having to convert to at least nominal Catholicism. And I had Katte being all chill about it.
But maybe I can make it work by going with a headcanon according to which he's extremely questioning before his time in prison and death sentence, at which point he jumps back into the Protestant fold with a vengeance (there are atheists in foxholes, but I have to conclude Katte was not one), but has absorbed *societal* biases about the evils of Catholicism, like Fritz's anti-Semitism (and let's be real, probably Katte's unattested anti-Semitism as well :/).
So he puts up more resistance, but Fritz wins him over in the end, just like he did with the escape attempt.
Once more, I feel completely justified in the first of my Fritz/MT AUs. :)
Heeee! Well, yes :)
Yes, yes, yours are more justified than mine. :P
I... was looking for something else in salon recently and ended up rereading a comment thread about how Fritz basically worked up until the day he died. Following his father's example. This all makes me very sad :(
Yeah. If it's any comfort, he credited Wilhelmine with teaching him to love not only learning but work? But yeah, his father's example loomed large as well.
Not sure if this counts as comfort, I agree with Krockow that a lot of Fritz's inability to stop *doing things*, whatever things they were (work/studying/conversation/music/poetry), for five minutes, was driven by his inability to be alone with his thoughts, due to depression/PTSD. So it wasn't all FW's example? At any rate, it's bittersweet to me that he was able to keep working up till the very end.
Re: Austrian marriage plans
Date: 2021-02-21 12:40 am (UTC)Ahhhh okay! And ha, yeah, I can see you guys talked about it but I can also see that I just didn't know enough to be able to absorb everything properly :)
The entire fic as well as the dialogue is carefully constructed to make it open to both interpretations.
...But yeah, it is heavily skewed to direct you toward my personal preference, which is why you remember it that way. :P
Ha! Yes, all right, I see that now. But yes, given that those bits are wholly in Fritz's POV... :P
So yeah, sorry for imprinting you before salon had read All The Things. :P
:)
I find masquerading (in any form, for any reason) far more interesting than sincere piety.
Not gonna lie, I read this sentence and my brain was like VOLTAIRE! :D But anyway, I find both interesting but in different ways, and they appeal to different parts of my psyche. Masquerading is certainly more intellectually interesting and stimulating to me, deist "defender of the Protestant faith" having texts read in the church about not suffering a woman to lead makes me laugh, lol, and sincere piety can easily be boring (I must reluctantly concede that I actually don't want fic about EC), but sometimes piety can be interesting.
Though in MT's case I think a large part of why I glommed onto her was not particularly her piety but because it was such a relief to find someone in this fandom who was from a vaguely-functional family (although I suppose she had her own problems, and she managed to mess up her kids a fair amount, at least they weren't... Hohenzollern problems).
So it wasn't all FW's example? At any rate, it's bittersweet to me that he was able to keep working up till the very end.
Yeah, I know we talked about this before a bit... But it just breaks my heart that FW was like "what a lazy kid I have" and, like, NO!
Re: Austrian marriage plans
Date: 2021-02-21 12:49 am (UTC)Not gonna lie, I had Voltaire on the brain when I wrote this! He went to Mass any number of times.
sometimes piety can be interesting.
I agree that it can be, but it's *generally* less interesting to me than cunning plans and ulterior motives, and certainly in this case. Which is why I'm disappointed and leaning toward ignoring the Hans Heinrich letters wherever possible. :P Or at least working around them.
Though in MT's case I think a large part of why I glommed onto her was not particularly her piety but because it was such a relief to find someone in this fandom who was from a vaguely-functional family (although I suppose she had her own problems, and she managed to mess up her kids a fair amount, at least they weren't... Hohenzollern problems).
What MT feels I do have are largely focused on her being a TERRIER. She has many other good traits, such as correcting her husband' spelling and snarking at Fritz's dirty laundry, total respect there. :P
Yeah, I know we talked about this before a bit... But it just breaks my heart that FW was like "what a lazy kid I have" and, like, NO!
I KNOW, RIGHT? He didn't know his kids, like, at all. Not even AW, clearly. :/
Re: Austrian marriage plans
Date: 2021-02-21 12:57 am (UTC)Yeah, I was definitely wrong about Fritz's perspective on Katte's sincerity. I was drawing on his "it's easy to compel someone to profess religious beliefs, but you gain nothing from the empty words" quote, instead of the interrogation protocols about which I did not know yet.
But I totally left the fic ambiguous as to whether it's a ghost visitation or a fever/opium dream (even the tags!), and as you saw, I call out the ambiguity in that exchange by having Fritz say, "I knew it!" and Katte go, "I'm your dream. I am as you remember me." :P
And then, even waffling like that, I *still* managed to be wrong! GDI. :P