Teaching kids history in Moscow or becoming FW's scholar-slash-fool? Well, Morgenstern might have thought that if things went badly in Moscow, he was stuck there, incredibly far away from everywhere else he could make a living, whereas if the FW job was as awful as rumor had it, he could always hightail it across the Saxon border and try again at the universities there.
I have to say I think the speech is really quite clever for the topic "Scholars are fools" which was supposed to be a humiliation! It actually sounds like it was a lecture he could reasonably have felt good about giving (given the getup and everything) while still keeping FW happy.
True, and I can see how that made Leineweber conclude that a man giving such a speech is capable of enough subversiveness to write what on the face of it is a FW hagiography but really also an attack.
Gutzmar: no idea. Beyond saying that it's amazing Fritz follwed Morgenstern's rec over Podewils' in this matter, Leineweber does not say what became of him, and like Mildred, I don't recall this matter from accounts of the first Silesian War in the biographies I've read. It might be worth going back to the older multi volume ones like Preuss or Koser to check, but otoh, these two gentlemen wrote within the age of Hohenzollern censorship and like I said, the official version of the First Silesian War was that most of the Silesians were joyfully greeting their Protestant liberator from Habsburg tyranny, not that Fritz sends his father's former scholar-plus-fool as an agitator and spy into the Silesian capital, etc.
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Re: The Life and Times of Samuel Jakob Morgenstern
Date: 2021-03-14 05:53 am (UTC)I have to say I think the speech is really quite clever for the topic "Scholars are fools" which was supposed to be a humiliation! It actually sounds like it was a lecture he could reasonably have felt good about giving (given the getup and everything) while still keeping FW happy.
True, and I can see how that made Leineweber conclude that a man giving such a speech is capable of enough subversiveness to write what on the face of it is a FW hagiography but really also an attack.
Gutzmar: no idea. Beyond saying that it's amazing Fritz follwed Morgenstern's rec over Podewils' in this matter, Leineweber does not say what became of him, and like Mildred, I don't recall this matter from accounts of the first Silesian War in the biographies I've read. It might be worth going back to the older multi volume ones like Preuss or Koser to check, but otoh, these two gentlemen wrote within the age of Hohenzollern censorship and like I said, the official version of the First Silesian War was that most of the Silesians were joyfully greeting their Protestant liberator from Habsburg tyranny, not that Fritz sends his father's former scholar-plus-fool as an agitator and spy into the Silesian capital, etc.