Haha, I love the thread title. Over a year ago, I replied to cahn's comment on my fic "The Care and Feeding of Italian Greyhounds" with:
Fritz: not your dream boss. :P Possibly your dream owner if you're a dog. [ETA: Well, aside from the whole taking you into a war zone. ;) ]
Salon hivemind at work again today? :D
My speculation: it's a matter of perspective. Compared with the huge number of daily performances, see my previous translated excerpt, Schöning can say Fritz only attended rarely concerts anymore. To normal people, two or three times a week is often.
I did remember you telling us the one author argued with this traditional depiction, and I immediately started making protesting sounds when I got to this part of the write-up, haha. Your explanation makes sense.
Concerts Georg, who lives at Sanssouci and attends 10,000 concerts a day, is an outlier who should not have been counted. ;)
if you treat the army as a deposit for people you want to punish, you're not making it look attractive and honorable
This is a good point, Fritz!
He used to say "Post mortem nihil est, and that proves that he thought that he didn't believe in the immortality of the soul. He also used to say : Ex nihilo nihil est. So there has to be someone who created the world and everything in it; (...) so he recognized a single God as the creator and beginning of all things.
Ha, Catt! :P
But yes, this jives with what Fritz said for most of his adult life, starting with when Voltaire won the battle against Wolff. ;)
Regarding chastity and honesty, the King showed a great deal of shame about his person; he didn't even allow his own servants to see him in the nude(Sidenote: in case this isn't clear, Schöning means he didn't piss or shit in their presence. Now today that's a given, but not so much in the 18th century, or earlier. One of the important offices among the courtiers of Henry VIII., for example, was the gentleman of the stool, who, yes, had to wipe the royal bottom.)
Same for Louis XV, if I'm not mistaken.
But yes, given what I'd read about Fritz dressing himself and not wanting to be seen in the nude (Fritz, you're just giving Zimmermann ideas!), I assumed that he was also unusual in not relieving himself in front of other people.
Fritz: a good patient? The more pain he felt during his illnesses, the kinder and more graciously he behaved towards those who were nursing him. It was always a certain sign of his impending recovery when he started to be rude to the people he'd been content with while he was suffering.
Good grief.
Oh, Fritz.
of these one was the favourite, and the others were this favourite's companions
Awww. <33
The former was always lying next to the King on a chair with cushions and slept in her master's bed at night. The others had to leave the room in the evening, but returned early in the morning when the King was woken up.
Aaahh. Okay, a plot hole I *didn't* know about. *grumbles* But okay, that's a minor one because it's Fritz's specific practice, not like having your servants light the fire and wake you up, which is *everyone*, even "I dress myself and want privacy for relieving myself* weirdo Fritz. ;)
he also owned a pack at the palace of Potsdam and in the Jägerhof which consisted of forty to fifty whippets
Had encountered this, had not had it confirmed by a reliable source. This source is a treasure trove!
Also, Jägerhof. Hmm. A Potsdam Jägerhof (I know they were ubiquitous), separate from the Berlin one? Google is not helping me out here, the only Jägerhof hit I get being some 20 km south of Sanssouci, but we've established that "Jägerhof" is almost as hard to google as "Völker". It was only thanks to Lehndorff mentioning that the Ariane got compensated with a pension when Fritz turned the Berlin Jägerhof into a bank in 1765 that we ever found the Keith residence.
Anyway, I'm tentatively leaning toward a separate Jägerhof, since otherwise you have an interesting situation at the bank after 1765, and before that, you'd better hope the Keiths were dog lovers!
(Either way, I want that fic!)
But no, Schöning doesn't tell us what became of them after Fritz' death, either.
Sigh.
In his younger years, he wanted to find out by a self experiment whether the Roman-Catholics deserved credit for their fasting. However, he decided that it wasn't much effort if you were allowed to eat fish, eggs, butter, cheese and milk; though he did try to live for forty days without the earlier mentioned food, but found it hard, and in order to make it through that time resorted to chocolate.
This isn't fasting, Fritz, but you do you.
No? My vague impression was that Lenten fasting was abstaining from meat and eating one meal a day. We know Fritz can do the one meal a day thing (though that August 5 meal should count as three, no wonder he needed so much time to digest :P), and what he seems to be saying is that pescetarianism isn't hard, but veganism is.
Grandpa F1, who treated his wife and kid gently, loved culture and never hit anyone in his life: stunned.
Poor, underappreciated F1.
In conclusion, Schöning is a gold mine, and I'm still pinching myself at having someone who reads and translates book after book for me! Hand kisses!
Re: Schöning: Old Fritz: Not Your Dream Boss (Unless You're Dog)
A Potsdam Jägerhof (I know they were ubiquitous), separate from the Berlin one?
Definitely, yes. There's a Jägertor and a Jägerallee to the north of the city, which is also where the Jägerhof used to be. Manger talks about it a couple of times, see the compilation here; he even mentions the dogs in 1765.
Re: Schöning: Old Fritz: Not Your Dream Boss (Unless You're Dog)
if you treat the army as a deposit for people you want to punish, you're not making it look attractive and honorable
This is a good point, Fritz!
The irony is that Fritz, according to Schöning as well as everyone else, at this point of his life really truly loved the army and would not hear a bad word about it. Remember the explosion at Borcke (FW2's governor) for muttering some peace approving statements?
Ha, Catt! :P
LOL. Yes, it's very clear Catt was seeing what he wanted to see, if he didn't rewrite Fritz deliberately.
But yes, given what I'd read about Fritz dressing himself and not wanting to be seen in the nude (Fritz, you're just giving Zimmermann ideas!)
So he did. Fritz' freakish-for-his-time insistence of not letting the staff see him au naturell is Zimmerman's exhibit A) bit of evidence for his "must have had a broken/malformed penis" theory.
not like having your servants light the fire and wake you up, which is *everyone*, even "I dress myself and want privacy for relieving myself* weirdo Fritz
Minor nitpick: according to the biographies I read for my Yuletide story, Catherine did, in fact, like to light her fireplace herself in the morning. Though she did get woken up by her servants, six o'clock sharp every morning (via knocking), no matter the festivities in the night.
Poor, underappreciated F1.
Seriously though, why did Fritz have it in for Gramps? I mean, this is a consistent obsessive trait; Voltaire remarks on it in his letters 1750s letters, and as the statements he quotes from Fritz there are almost identical to what Schöning reports decades later, and Lucchesini, I'm assuming a "Reasons why Grandpa sucked!" rant was one of the regular events. And it's not like he had memories of the man himself, what with F1 dying while he was still a baby. I mean, sure, all the money spending offers enough room for critique, but you don't see Fritz having a go at, say, August the Strong for the same reason, when compared to August's money spending F1 was actually small scale. Still, just about the only time Fritz brings up Grandpa without ranting about how much he sucked is in the interrogation protocols when he points out the precedent of a Prince of Prussia leaving the country without royal permission (and FW heatedly replies that that was different because future F1 was afraid he'd get poisoned by his stepmother).
So, my current theories:
a) Projection theory I: Fritz was very aware FW was afraid Fritz would become F1 reborn, between their shared love for the arts, fashionable, comfortable clothing and fascination with all things French. He therefore blamed Grandpa for having caused a mindset in Dad for which he, Fritz, then paid the price. This of course he couldn't say, and thus he rants about what a sucky King F1 was instead.
b) Projection theory II: Fritz did see the similarities and did some more projecting. All those accusations of pride and vanity and wannabe Louis XIV are in fact self loathing.
c) Projection theory III: As Schöning (and Mitchell, and Catt) report, Fritz even when bringing up FW's temper and parenting was always careful to praise him more than to critique him, and to venerate him. After the letters to Wilhelmine from the 1730s, there is no more testified Fritz statement that's unmoderated hostility towards FW. Which doesn't mean those emotions were gone. But he can't vent them anymore. So he directs all the anger at his parents at Grandpa, who is a safe target since venerating him isn't necessary to uphold the Prussian mentality, on the contrary, you can use him as a bad example.
Fasting: My point here was that you don't eat chocolate while fasting. No meat, yes, and it's true that fish, cheese, milk etc. are all okay, but chocolate during lent is a no go. That's what you eat at Easter! (In egg form, these days though of course not then. *g*)
Re: Schöning: Old Fritz: Not Your Dream Boss (Unless You're Dog)
Minor nitpick: according to the biographies I read for my Yuletide story, Catherine did, in fact, like to light her fireplace herself in the morning. Though she did get woken up by her servants, six o'clock sharp every morning (via knocking), no matter the festivities in the night.
Fair! Now that you remind me of this, I do remember you telling us this. But 1) your corpse not being found until later in the morning/day because you didn't get up on your own is more of a modern phenomenon than one you'd expect from a monarch with servants, 2) I knew that Fritz specifically was woken up by his servants, so slight plot hole there that can only be handwaved by claiming that Glasow lied.
Seriously though, why did Fritz have it in for Gramps?
Current theory? That I came up with last night and was planning to share, then found that you had come up with several similar theories? ;) (Although not this precise one.)
My theory is that Fritz spent his entire childhood being told, and with everyone else being told, that because he liked the same things Grandpa liked, he would turn into the Worst King Ever. Then he turned out to be a king who likes the same things Grandpa liked! But because he also imprinted on Dad's values of 1) army, 2) money, 3) work, he feels very very defensive about spending money on palaces and artists and such, and has to make sure everyone knows that HE is not going to run HIS country into the ground, HE is the BEST KING EVER, and he proves this by agreeing that Gramps was THE WORST. "We are COMPLETELY DIFFERENT," he says. "See, Dad? Are you proud of me now? Well done, son? Maybe?"
But that doesn't mean there weren't also other elements. People often have more than one motive for whatever they're doing or thinking. I'm skeptical about your number 2, but 1 and 3 seem quite likely. I particularly like 3: frustrated venting that he can't express toward his father (Mixed feelings in this century? Not toward family you don't! Foreign intellectuals named Voltaire are fair game. :P) seems quite plausible.
Fasting: My point here was that you don't eat chocolate while fasting. No meat, yes, and it's true that fish, cheese, milk etc. are all okay, but chocolate during lent is a no go.
Really? I know that individuals who like chocolate often choose to give it up, in the same way some people give up television for Lent, but I wasn't aware that canon law had anything to say about chocolate, and I can't find any mention of it in my googling. Canon law (Catholic--other denominations are sometimes stricter) seems to define abstinence as abstaining from meat (seafood and other animal products okay), and fasting as not eating more than one meal and a couple snacks a day. Both in early modern and modern times. In the second half of the twentieth century, the Church reduced the number of days on which you're expected to abstain from meat during Lent (and allowed bishops to tweak the rules for their own flock), but I find no reference to chocolate before or after that change. It's an individual choice as far as I know.
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Re: Schöning: Old Fritz: Not Your Dream Boss (Unless You're Dog)
Fritz: not your dream boss. :P Possibly your dream owner if you're a dog. [ETA: Well, aside from the whole taking you into a war zone. ;) ]
Salon hivemind at work again today? :D
My speculation: it's a matter of perspective. Compared with the huge number of daily performances, see my previous translated excerpt, Schöning can say Fritz only attended rarely concerts anymore. To normal people, two or three times a week is often.
I did remember you telling us the one author argued with this traditional depiction, and I immediately started making protesting sounds when I got to this part of the write-up, haha. Your explanation makes sense.
Concerts Georg, who lives at Sanssouci and attends 10,000 concerts a day, is an outlier who should not have been counted. ;)
if you treat the army as a deposit for people you want to punish, you're not making it look attractive and honorable
This is a good point, Fritz!
He used to say "Post mortem nihil est, and that proves that he thought that he didn't believe in the immortality of the soul. He also used to say : Ex nihilo nihil est. So there has to be someone who created the world and everything in it; (...) so he recognized a single God as the creator and beginning of all things.
Ha, Catt! :P
But yes, this jives with what Fritz said for most of his adult life, starting with when Voltaire won the battle against Wolff. ;)
Regarding chastity and honesty, the King showed a great deal of shame about his person; he didn't even allow his own servants to see him in the nude(Sidenote: in case this isn't clear, Schöning means he didn't piss or shit in their presence. Now today that's a given, but not so much in the 18th century, or earlier. One of the important offices among the courtiers of Henry VIII., for example, was the gentleman of the stool, who, yes, had to wipe the royal bottom.)
Same for Louis XV, if I'm not mistaken.
But yes, given what I'd read about Fritz dressing himself and not wanting to be seen in the nude (Fritz, you're just giving Zimmermann ideas!), I assumed that he was also unusual in not relieving himself in front of other people.
Fritz: a good patient? The more pain he felt during his illnesses, the kinder and more graciously he behaved towards those who were nursing him. It was always a certain sign of his impending recovery when he started to be rude to the people he'd been content with while he was suffering.
Good grief.
Oh, Fritz.
of these one was the favourite, and the others were this favourite's companions
Awww. <33
The former was always lying next to the King on a chair with cushions and slept in her master's bed at night. The others had to leave the room in the evening, but returned early in the morning when the King was woken up.
Aaahh. Okay, a plot hole I *didn't* know about. *grumbles* But okay, that's a minor one because it's Fritz's specific practice, not like having your servants light the fire and wake you up, which is *everyone*, even "I dress myself and want privacy for relieving myself* weirdo Fritz. ;)
he also owned a pack at the palace of Potsdam and in the Jägerhof which consisted of forty to fifty whippets
Had encountered this, had not had it confirmed by a reliable source. This source is a treasure trove!
Also, Jägerhof. Hmm. A Potsdam Jägerhof (I know they were ubiquitous), separate from the Berlin one? Google is not helping me out here, the only Jägerhof hit I get being some 20 km south of Sanssouci, but we've established that "Jägerhof" is almost as hard to google as "Völker". It was only thanks to Lehndorff mentioning that the Ariane got compensated with a pension when Fritz turned the Berlin Jägerhof into a bank in 1765 that we ever found the Keith residence.
Anyway, I'm tentatively leaning toward a separate Jägerhof, since otherwise you have an interesting situation at the bank after 1765, and before that, you'd better hope the Keiths were dog lovers!
(Either way, I want that fic!)
But no, Schöning doesn't tell us what became of them after Fritz' death, either.
Sigh.
In his younger years, he wanted to find out by a self experiment whether the Roman-Catholics deserved credit for their fasting. However, he decided that it wasn't much effort if you were allowed to eat fish, eggs, butter, cheese and milk; though he did try to live for forty days without the earlier mentioned food, but found it hard, and in order to make it through that time resorted to chocolate.
This isn't fasting, Fritz, but you do you.
No? My vague impression was that Lenten fasting was abstaining from meat and eating one meal a day. We know Fritz can do the one meal a day thing (though that August 5 meal should count as three, no wonder he needed so much time to digest :P), and what he seems to be saying is that pescetarianism isn't hard, but veganism is.
Grandpa F1, who treated his wife and kid gently, loved culture and never hit anyone in his life: stunned.
Poor, underappreciated F1.
In conclusion, Schöning is a gold mine, and I'm still pinching myself at having someone who reads and translates book after book for me! Hand kisses!
Re: Schöning: Old Fritz: Not Your Dream Boss (Unless You're Dog)
Definitely, yes. There's a Jägertor and a Jägerallee to the north of the city, which is also where the Jägerhof used to be. Manger talks about it a couple of times, see the compilation here; he even mentions the dogs in 1765.
Re: Schöning: Old Fritz: Not Your Dream Boss (Unless You're Dog)
I had found the Jägertor being erected in 1733, but wasn't sure it went with a Jägerhof. Thank you!
Re: Schöning: Old Fritz: Not Your Dream Boss (Unless You're Dog)
This is a good point, Fritz!
The irony is that Fritz, according to Schöning as well as everyone else, at this point of his life really truly loved the army and would not hear a bad word about it. Remember the explosion at Borcke (FW2's governor) for muttering some peace approving statements?
Ha, Catt! :P
LOL. Yes, it's very clear Catt was seeing what he wanted to see, if he didn't rewrite Fritz deliberately.
But yes, given what I'd read about Fritz dressing himself and not wanting to be seen in the nude (Fritz, you're just giving Zimmermann ideas!)
So he did. Fritz' freakish-for-his-time insistence of not letting the staff see him au naturell is Zimmerman's exhibit A) bit of evidence for his "must have had a broken/malformed penis" theory.
not like having your servants light the fire and wake you up, which is *everyone*, even "I dress myself and want privacy for relieving myself* weirdo Fritz
Minor nitpick: according to the biographies I read for my Yuletide story, Catherine did, in fact, like to light her fireplace herself in the morning. Though she did get woken up by her servants, six o'clock sharp every morning (via knocking), no matter the festivities in the night.
Poor, underappreciated F1.
Seriously though, why did Fritz have it in for Gramps? I mean, this is a consistent obsessive trait; Voltaire remarks on it in his letters 1750s letters, and as the statements he quotes from Fritz there are almost identical to what Schöning reports decades later, and Lucchesini, I'm assuming a "Reasons why Grandpa sucked!" rant was one of the regular events. And it's not like he had memories of the man himself, what with F1 dying while he was still a baby. I mean, sure, all the money spending offers enough room for critique, but you don't see Fritz having a go at, say, August the Strong for the same reason, when compared to August's money spending F1 was actually small scale. Still, just about the only time Fritz brings up Grandpa without ranting about how much he sucked is in the interrogation protocols when he points out the precedent of a Prince of Prussia leaving the country without royal permission (and FW heatedly replies that that was different because future F1 was afraid he'd get poisoned by his stepmother).
So, my current theories:
a) Projection theory I: Fritz was very aware FW was afraid Fritz would become F1 reborn, between their shared love for the arts, fashionable, comfortable clothing and fascination with all things French. He therefore blamed Grandpa for having caused a mindset in Dad for which he, Fritz, then paid the price. This of course he couldn't say, and thus he rants about what a sucky King F1 was instead.
b) Projection theory II: Fritz did see the similarities and did some more projecting. All those accusations of pride and vanity and wannabe Louis XIV are in fact self loathing.
c) Projection theory III: As Schöning (and Mitchell, and Catt) report, Fritz even when bringing up FW's temper and parenting was always careful to praise him more than to critique him, and to venerate him. After the letters to Wilhelmine from the 1730s, there is no more testified Fritz statement that's unmoderated hostility towards FW. Which doesn't mean those emotions were gone. But he can't vent them anymore. So he directs all the anger at his parents at Grandpa, who is a safe target since venerating him isn't necessary to uphold the Prussian mentality, on the contrary, you can use him as a bad example.
Fasting: My point here was that you don't eat chocolate while fasting. No meat, yes, and it's true that fish, cheese, milk etc. are all okay, but chocolate during lent is a no go. That's what you eat at Easter! (In egg form, these days though of course not then. *g*)
Re: Schöning: Old Fritz: Not Your Dream Boss (Unless You're Dog)
Fair! Now that you remind me of this, I do remember you telling us this. But 1) your corpse not being found until later in the morning/day because you didn't get up on your own is more of a modern phenomenon than one you'd expect from a monarch with servants, 2) I knew that Fritz specifically was woken up by his servants, so slight plot hole there that can only be handwaved by claiming that Glasow lied.
Seriously though, why did Fritz have it in for Gramps?
Current theory? That I came up with last night and was planning to share, then found that you had come up with several similar theories? ;) (Although not this precise one.)
My theory is that Fritz spent his entire childhood being told, and with everyone else being told, that because he liked the same things Grandpa liked, he would turn into the Worst King Ever. Then he turned out to be a king who likes the same things Grandpa liked! But because he also imprinted on Dad's values of 1) army, 2) money, 3) work, he feels very very defensive about spending money on palaces and artists and such, and has to make sure everyone knows that HE is not going to run HIS country into the ground, HE is the BEST KING EVER, and he proves this by agreeing that Gramps was THE WORST. "We are COMPLETELY DIFFERENT," he says. "See, Dad? Are you proud of me now? Well done, son? Maybe?"
But that doesn't mean there weren't also other elements. People often have more than one motive for whatever they're doing or thinking. I'm skeptical about your number 2, but 1 and 3 seem quite likely. I particularly like 3: frustrated venting that he can't express toward his father (Mixed feelings in this century? Not toward family you don't! Foreign intellectuals named Voltaire are fair game. :P) seems quite plausible.
Fasting: My point here was that you don't eat chocolate while fasting. No meat, yes, and it's true that fish, cheese, milk etc. are all okay, but chocolate during lent is a no go.
Really? I know that individuals who like chocolate often choose to give it up, in the same way some people give up television for Lent, but I wasn't aware that canon law had anything to say about chocolate, and I can't find any mention of it in my googling. Canon law (Catholic--other denominations are sometimes stricter) seems to define abstinence as abstaining from meat (seafood and other animal products okay), and fasting as not eating more than one meal and a couple snacks a day. Both in early modern and modern times. In the second half of the twentieth century, the Church reduced the number of days on which you're expected to abstain from meat during Lent (and allowed bishops to tweak the rules for their own flock), but I find no reference to chocolate before or after that change. It's an individual choice as far as I know.
But I'm open to counterevidence!