Via Nicolai, who had a lot of contact with Quantz and names his sources is pretty good! (I mean, not necessarily for every single detail, but for this event happening.)
Indeed. knew you'd be happy this is not a headcanon you have to abandon. :)
I did not know about the Haarbeutel! I knew that Fritz's hair was done up in a fancy French style as opposed to the Prussian pigtail, but not the detail of what it looked like.
Der Thronfolger, which restages this scene pretty faithfully, nonetheless drew the line at a Haarbeutel, I realise retrospectively, and so FW having a go at Fritz' hairstyle in addition to everything else sort of comes out of nowwhere because Fritz' hair doesn't look so different from how it does in other scenes (except he's not wearing a wig, which he usually does when with Dad).
This is interesting, because I always learned that it was Fritz who was wearing a red dressing gown!
So have I, and I think what happened is the similar as with the MT quip made by someone else and then attributed to Fritz; at some point in the retelling, someone decided that no one cares what Quantz wore on that occasion, red or not, the point is what Fritz wears, so instead of just a golden brocade dressing gown, he gets a golden-brocade-and-red-silk dressing gown.
BTW, since Quantz at this point has a well paid job in Saxony and is making these trips to Berlin solely for Fritz' sake, you can tell how emotionally invested he must have been, to put up with the prospect of angry FW. (Who'd have thought nothing of beating up a mere commoner and musician, one assumes.)
when Selena says he does no such thing
The way I recall it is that he says Fritz loved Fredersdorf like a father loves his son, full stop; he definitely does not say intense rocco friendship (that's more Schmidt-Lötzen's approach to Lehndorff's everything in his introduction), not least because Fredersdorf of course is in no way Fritz' equal and not interesting in himself, etc, but he can be loved like a son (by nineteen years old Fritz, when Fredersdorf is three years older). And at a different point in the book Richter rants somewhat about the modern tendency to Freudianize and sexualize everything, but not related to Fritz/Fredersdorf. The one several pages (might be nine) lecture we get is on Fritz/EC, i.e. Fritz' bad behavior towards her, which is the sole thing he critiques Fritz for, but explains as being the result of FW "raping his young soul" - he does say vergewaltigen, rape - into this marriage. The rant against the modern psychonalytic approach becomes hypocritcal when at yet another point, he diagnoses Wilhelmine as suffering from hysteria.
Quantz is frozen with panic (it sounds like), and Katte is ON IT. Just what I would expect of him. <3 And that's even more interesting given that Quantz is the narrator and has no incentive to make Katte sound better at his own expense.
Quite! It heightens the plausibility of the whole event and the reliability of Quantz as a narrator to no end.
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Re: The FW-Fritz-Quantz-Katte tale (Nicolai version)
Date: 2021-02-26 07:35 am (UTC)Indeed. knew you'd be happy this is not a headcanon you have to abandon. :)
I did not know about the Haarbeutel! I knew that Fritz's hair was done up in a fancy French style as opposed to the Prussian pigtail, but not the detail of what it looked like.
Der Thronfolger, which restages this scene pretty faithfully, nonetheless drew the line at a Haarbeutel, I realise retrospectively, and so FW having a go at Fritz' hairstyle in addition to everything else sort of comes out of nowwhere because Fritz' hair doesn't look so different from how it does in other scenes (except he's not wearing a wig, which he usually does when with Dad).
This is interesting, because I always learned that it was Fritz who was wearing a red dressing gown!
So have I, and I think what happened is the similar as with the MT quip made by someone else and then attributed to Fritz; at some point in the retelling, someone decided that no one cares what Quantz wore on that occasion, red or not, the point is what Fritz wears, so instead of just a golden brocade dressing gown, he gets a golden-brocade-and-red-silk dressing gown.
BTW, since Quantz at this point has a well paid job in Saxony and is making these trips to Berlin solely for Fritz' sake, you can tell how emotionally invested he must have been, to put up with the prospect of angry FW. (Who'd have thought nothing of beating up a mere commoner and musician, one assumes.)
when Selena says he does no such thing
The way I recall it is that he says Fritz loved Fredersdorf like a father loves his son, full stop; he definitely does not say intense rocco friendship (that's more Schmidt-Lötzen's approach to Lehndorff's everything in his introduction), not least because Fredersdorf of course is in no way Fritz' equal and not interesting in himself, etc, but he can be loved like a son (by nineteen years old Fritz, when Fredersdorf is three years older). And at a different point in the book Richter rants somewhat about the modern tendency to Freudianize and sexualize everything, but not related to Fritz/Fredersdorf. The one several pages (might be nine) lecture we get is on Fritz/EC, i.e. Fritz' bad behavior towards her, which is the sole thing he critiques Fritz for, but explains as being the result of FW "raping his young soul" - he does say vergewaltigen, rape - into this marriage. The rant against the modern psychonalytic approach becomes hypocritcal when at yet another point, he diagnoses Wilhelmine as suffering from hysteria.
Quantz is frozen with panic (it sounds like), and Katte is ON IT. Just what I would expect of him. <3 And that's even more interesting given that Quantz is the narrator and has no incentive to make Katte sound better at his own expense.
Quite! It heightens the plausibility of the whole event and the reliability of Quantz as a narrator to no end.