Now, on to the novel I mostly wanted to read: "Der König und sein Narr" by Martin Stade. (And no one else.) I then also saw the film version, and will write about both, because they're both excellent, though the book has a flaw the film version covers, whereas the film version lacks something that's really important in the book.
Book: harrowing. It's written in first person, narrated by Gundling who spends his last weeks of life writing this book trying to figure out why all this happened, how he got from scholar to dying court fool with a coffin in the guise of a big barrel of wine standing in his room in which he knows he'll be put. The first person perspective at one point means Stade has to cheat because he evidently wanted to include a scene with FW where Gundling doesn't show up, and he has Gundling imagine how it must have happened. But Gundling's argument - that by now he knows exactly how the King feels and thinks and as a professional historian can flesh these things out - is hard to refute.
The biggest difference to Der Meister of Sanssouci is that Gundling while being an incredibly tragic figure is written as being partly complicit in his terrible fate. Not in the sense of "he deserves this", absolutely not, but as he goes back to understand how his life turned out this way, he realises at several points where he still could have made other choices, where it hadn't been too late yet. Also, the novel, which starts with F1's death, lets Gundling - who is now jobless since FW immediately fire the entire heraldic and historic department as part of his austerity measures - actively seek out FW so he can keep a job at court and won't have to make the rounds at the universities and patrons outside Prussia again. After talking to FW's servant Creutz and hearing FW wants to encourage Prussian manufacturing, that he has no time for history and is all about commerce, Gundling he recalls he himself has written an essay about manufacturing and commerce and cajoles Creutz to bring this up with FW, and he writes a petition to FW, too. Since Gundling is victimized through the greater part of the novel, it's I think a good choice on Stade's part to let him have as much of an agenda as it's possible. It's also this, from the get go, that makes this novel work not just as a historical novel but as a general "intellectuals and power" book that is very evidently also reflecting the situation it's written in, i.e. in a dictatorship. Can you keep your integrity and your art while accomodating absolute power? Gundling has a mixture of selflish and selfless motives early on: he had liked his comfortable job with F1, he's near 40 and doesn't want to go back to becoming a jobless scholar, but he also, when he meets FW, realises that FW actually is serious about reform and realises this could put him in a position where he, Gundling, can help making a difference, can make the country better.
Stade is really good at making it understandable why Gundling initially finds FW a real chance and despite increasing warning signs sticks it out for a while, and he also lets FW initially be seriously impressed by Gundling (who points out a few useful things, such as, two thirds of Berlin lived directly or indirectly through the court (carpenters, artisans, washerwomen, tailors, every level of food delivery etc), so when there's no more court in that sense, you need to supply other employment quickly or they'll all leave before starving); FW doesn't start the relationship thinking he wants someone else to kick around. But there are also red flag signals about his capacity for cruelty, and each described session of the Tobacco Parliament also is terrific (and visceral to read) in how it depicts the group dynamics encouraging each other's cruelty and make it ever worse. Narrating Gundling realises he participated early on when he didn't have to - he was annoyed at the fool (the real, official fool), so he had a go at him; when a wife who was a professional snitch on deserters and her husband showed up to petition FW to grant them a divorce, and the tobacco college who finds it hilarious that the woman is fat and the man is thin goads and mocks them instead, and finally sets them at each other, with FW deciding that the one of them who manages to beat the other at dice can literally beat the other (as in hit, brutally) out of the room, Gundling the narrator muses that these two, who are outcasts and only have each other, could have been allies in their misery, could have escaped what was about to happen if only they'd refused to turn on each other, but instead they let the lords use them as their entertainment by venting their agrression and misery on each other, he also reflect that he himself could have protested, or left, or just remained silent, but after a while watching the two, he too, joined everyone else's laughter, unable to realise he was looking at his own future.
As the pranks against Gundling himself go from still passing as pranks (i.e. trying to frighten him with ghosts since he has said he doesn't believe in them) to physical assaults and vicious taunts, the number of titles and the salary FW heaps on him also rise, and they slide into a fatal dynamic where Gundling lives for those moments of "truth telling" where he makes clever remarks the King and his other companions can't find good rejoinders too, and those moments where he actually manages to change FW's mind on something; that's what he draws his ever more fragile sense of self worth from as much as the increasing amounts of alcohol, and in response FW grows ever more inventive with the "pranks", too, the more cutting the remarks become. Of Gundling's two escape attempts, only the second, longer one is described at full length. He first goes to Breslau but all teaching jobs available there demand that he converts to Catholicism, which he refuses to do. (Stade's Gundling isn't such a good Protestant, he's a secret atheist, but he's compromised so much already that he refuses to submit to Rome, too, after all the submissions to FW.) Instead, he hangs out with some rebellious students, which as it turns out makes for his last hours of freedom because Old Dessauer is there to kidnap him and bring him back to Prussia. (Sidenote: in Morgenstern's version, I think it was Derschau, which rank wise is more believable, but I can see Stade going for the better known guy.)
Gundling has just one more glimmer of light when he meets Anne de Larrey, and here's where I think the novel shows a flaw that the movie makes up for, because Stade's novel has the first encounter, then just the statement they got married and she was the only one who ever understood him, and much later he wonders why he wrote so much about FW and so litlte about her. Which imo is lampshading for: "I don't know how to write this character and this relationship." I'll get to how the film does it in a moment. But otherwise he's in free fall. There are two final steps of humiliation left, and both come after a seeming victory. Firstly, the Tobbacco Parliament has French ambassador Rottembourg as a guest when Gundling (who still has the reading the news job) reads out a short notice that Voltaire after his most recent stint in the Bastille has been brought to Calais with the permission to go to England and the strict interdiction to get closer than 50 miles to the French court. FW asks who this Voltaire is, Rottembourg says he had it coming, FW says if that's the French way of dealing with these things, well, in Brandenburg he has better methods to keep the country quiet. (This is also when Gundling realises that he's been kidding himself when clinging to the belief he could shame FW into doing the right thing now and then as a justification for staying around.) Gundling can't resist having a go at Rottembourg (who is written as a snobbish French aristocrat) with comments about how France fears the written and spoken word that clearly are meant for FW as well, and while Rottembourg loses the verbal duel, FW ends the encounter by saying he'll have to publish an edict against evil atheists like this Voltaire person (FW isn't into differentiation about Deism), and Gundling will write it for him.
Which Gundling is now too afraid not to do, and so he loses the last bit of his intellectual integrity he's been proud of. The other Pyrrhic victory is when FW presents him with David Fassmann as his potential sucessor, Fassmann (who has never met FW and wants the job) taunts Gundling and Gundling loses it and starts to beat on Fassmann. But now he's done just what all the others from the Tabagcie which he despised for being unable to answer verbal arguments except by brutal force has done, and that was the last moral differentiation he's been clinging to, and he's lost that as well. From this point onwards, all that's left is drinking himself to death. The last few pages are written in a hallucinatory style, with Gundling no longer able to tell what is reall and what isn't ("did I talk with the King about the Crown Prince?" is one of two Fritz mentions in this novel; the other is when Gundling briefly spots child Fritz and thinks he reminds him of a little caged bird), and where he comes up with an image summarizing everything: He sees the King who holds up a mirror to him, the mirror showing Gundling himself as he's now, in his entire degredation. But he also notices the King uses this mirror which shows Gundling like a shield, to avoid having to look at himself.
(Let me add here that one of the elements that make this book better than "Der Meister von Sanssouci" is that FW always feels like a character, one particular person, not someone who as an absolute monarch is bound to play a certain role by historic necessity. What FW does are his own actions; Gundling as the narrator never says, well, Kings, you, know, but progress marches on! That's what I mean by this novel not being orthodox.
Gundling's death is his final escape, when he is at least free of fear and pain and feels that curiosity again he had as a boy when he wanted to learn everything and wanted to understand and find out all the reasons, and when he understands that, he's free.
Now, the movie: script by Ulrich Plenzdorf, who wrote "Die neuen Leiden des jungen W.", the modern Werther novel which I read in school. There are, of course, a lot less characters (the novel even includes vivid cameos even by F1's ceremonial master von Besser, and by August the Strong when he's visiting Berlin), events like the bears do not happen (presumably because it would be way too dangerous to film that; also this is a German tv movie, and we don't have the budget for Hollywood trained stunt bears!) , the humiliation conga that Gundling observes and too late realises foreshadows his own is limited to just the female snitch showing up, not her husband (there are a few other examples in the novel); all these cuts are understandable, and they make room for fleshing out Anne de Larrey and her relationship with Gundling, which imo was really needed. So in the movie, we see how they connect, that she's kind and clever and that he's able to charm her by being witty without being cruel, and the marriage becomes the FW free space in his life, but alas too late to save him. As the movie is not told in the first person, we're in Anne's pov for the last section and at the funeral, where Fassmann holds the funeral speech. (The director and the actor didn't let Fassmann do this mockingly but suddenly fully aware he's next, and thus terrified.)
Another difference between movie and novel is something which I did miss, and that's letting Gundling actively work to get a job from FW. In the film, he gets fired after F1's death, he's on his way to leave Berlin when he's called back because FW has found out he's written that essay about manufactoring; there is no indication that Gundling tried to make this happen. Also, he doesn't laugh with the others early on in the Tobacco Parliament; he's thus presented entirely as an innocent there, and the way the evolving group dynamic happens is observed by him strictly from the outside, not form the inside. . (Plus where the novel has three different cases, of which the female snitch and her husband are but one, the movie has only the one, where, as I said, Gundling remains serious.) The film thus loses some complexity in its main character, though it has an invention later on to bring some of that back - the rebeillious students with whom Gundling has hung out in Breslau show up at his doorstep when he' married and has his own town residence, and he doesn't have the courage anymore to offer them sanctuary, not when his own welfare and that of Anne and her dead brother's children whom she has adopted are at stake. Still, not the same.
However, and it's a big however: the two leads are outstanding. Wolfgang Kieling as Gundling has a tragic dignity that goes with an increasing fragility despite not being a fragilly built man, a great voice and a way to convey so much with his acting of what's going on inside Gundling at any given point. And Götz George as FW is hands down the best FW I've yet seen on screen, which includes Günter Strack in Der Thronfolger. He feels like a living live wire, with an incredible energy barely hold in check and never falls into metaphorical moustache twirling or hammy acting, which makes scenes when FW goes from relatively harmless to doing something cruel way more effective. The script also trusts its audience to get the point without someone putting a sledge hammer on it as when FW on the one hand tells child!Fritz (in his one and only scene) that wars of agression are evil and on the other in the next breath goes on to bully people some more. That both novel and movie keep out the other Hohenzollerns as much as they can and focus on FW strictly in the context of his relationship with Gundling also makes the story as the absolutely perfect counterpoint to anyone pulling out the "well, 1730 and his relationship with his oldest son aside, he was really good!" argument. Both book and movie don't offer a final explanation as to why FW does what he does to Gundling - Gundling has an opinion about this, of course, but in the novel he's the pov character who offers this opinion, and in the film we only briefly see FW (twice) when Gundling isn't around, either). But what he does is the systematic destruction of a human being, that's made crystal clear in both versions (the film makes it even more literal in that the gigantic barrel of wine in which Gundling will later be buried is literally full of wine when it arrives so Gundling can drink himself do death on it, and does, while Anne is kept away from his bedroom by two soldiers), and that he does this is its own judgment on him.
Book Review II: Der König und sein Narr (Novel and Film)
Book: harrowing. It's written in first person, narrated by Gundling who spends his last weeks of life writing this book trying to figure out why all this happened, how he got from scholar to dying court fool with a coffin in the guise of a big barrel of wine standing in his room in which he knows he'll be put. The first person perspective at one point means Stade has to cheat because he evidently wanted to include a scene with FW where Gundling doesn't show up, and he has Gundling imagine how it must have happened. But Gundling's argument - that by now he knows exactly how the King feels and thinks and as a professional historian can flesh these things out - is hard to refute.
The biggest difference to Der Meister of Sanssouci is that Gundling while being an incredibly tragic figure is written as being partly complicit in his terrible fate. Not in the sense of "he deserves this", absolutely not, but as he goes back to understand how his life turned out this way, he realises at several points where he still could have made other choices, where it hadn't been too late yet. Also, the novel, which starts with F1's death, lets Gundling - who is now jobless since FW immediately fire the entire heraldic and historic department as part of his austerity measures - actively seek out FW so he can keep a job at court and won't have to make the rounds at the universities and patrons outside Prussia again. After talking to FW's servant Creutz and hearing FW wants to encourage Prussian manufacturing, that he has no time for history and is all about commerce, Gundling he recalls he himself has written an essay about manufacturing and commerce and cajoles Creutz to bring this up with FW, and he writes a petition to FW, too. Since Gundling is victimized through the greater part of the novel, it's I think a good choice on Stade's part to let him have as much of an agenda as it's possible. It's also this, from the get go, that makes this novel work not just as a historical novel but as a general "intellectuals and power" book that is very evidently also reflecting the situation it's written in, i.e. in a dictatorship. Can you keep your integrity and your art while accomodating absolute power? Gundling has a mixture of selflish and selfless motives early on: he had liked his comfortable job with F1, he's near 40 and doesn't want to go back to becoming a jobless scholar, but he also, when he meets FW, realises that FW actually is serious about reform and realises this could put him in a position where he, Gundling, can help making a difference, can make the country better.
Stade is really good at making it understandable why Gundling initially finds FW a real chance and despite increasing warning signs sticks it out for a while, and he also lets FW initially be seriously impressed by Gundling (who points out a few useful things, such as, two thirds of Berlin lived directly or indirectly through the court (carpenters, artisans, washerwomen, tailors, every level of food delivery etc), so when there's no more court in that sense, you need to supply other employment quickly or they'll all leave before starving); FW doesn't start the relationship thinking he wants someone else to kick around. But there are also red flag signals about his capacity for cruelty, and each described session of the Tobacco Parliament also is terrific (and visceral to read) in how it depicts the group dynamics encouraging each other's cruelty and make it ever worse. Narrating Gundling realises he participated early on when he didn't have to - he was annoyed at the fool (the real, official fool), so he had a go at him; when a wife who was a professional snitch on deserters and her husband showed up to petition FW to grant them a divorce, and the tobacco college who finds it hilarious that the woman is fat and the man is thin goads and mocks them instead, and finally sets them at each other, with FW deciding that the one of them who manages to beat the other at dice can literally beat the other (as in hit, brutally) out of the room, Gundling the narrator muses that these two, who are outcasts and only have each other, could have been allies in their misery, could have escaped what was about to happen if only they'd refused to turn on each other, but instead they let the lords use them as their entertainment by venting their agrression and misery on each other, he also reflect that he himself could have protested, or left, or just remained silent, but after a while watching the two, he too, joined everyone else's laughter, unable to realise he was looking at his own future.
As the pranks against Gundling himself go from still passing as pranks (i.e. trying to frighten him with ghosts since he has said he doesn't believe in them) to physical assaults and vicious taunts, the number of titles and the salary FW heaps on him also rise, and they slide into a fatal dynamic where Gundling lives for those moments of "truth telling" where he makes clever remarks the King and his other companions can't find good rejoinders too, and those moments where he actually manages to change FW's mind on something; that's what he draws his ever more fragile sense of self worth from as much as the increasing amounts of alcohol, and in response FW grows ever more inventive with the "pranks", too, the more cutting the remarks become. Of Gundling's two escape attempts, only the second, longer one is described at full length. He first goes to Breslau but all teaching jobs available there demand that he converts to Catholicism, which he refuses to do. (Stade's Gundling isn't such a good Protestant, he's a secret atheist, but he's compromised so much already that he refuses to submit to Rome, too, after all the submissions to FW.) Instead, he hangs out with some rebellious students, which as it turns out makes for his last hours of freedom because Old Dessauer is there to kidnap him and bring him back to Prussia. (Sidenote: in Morgenstern's version, I think it was Derschau, which rank wise is more believable, but I can see Stade going for the better known guy.)
Gundling has just one more glimmer of light when he meets Anne de Larrey, and here's where I think the novel shows a flaw that the movie makes up for, because Stade's novel has the first encounter, then just the statement they got married and she was the only one who ever understood him, and much later he wonders why he wrote so much about FW and so litlte about her. Which imo is lampshading for: "I don't know how to write this character and this relationship." I'll get to how the film does it in a moment. But otherwise he's in free fall. There are two final steps of humiliation left, and both come after a seeming victory. Firstly, the Tobbacco Parliament has French ambassador Rottembourg as a guest when Gundling (who still has the reading the news job) reads out a short notice that Voltaire after his most recent stint in the Bastille has been brought to Calais with the permission to go to England and the strict interdiction to get closer than 50 miles to the French court. FW asks who this Voltaire is, Rottembourg says he had it coming, FW says if that's the French way of dealing with these things, well, in Brandenburg he has better methods to keep the country quiet. (This is also when Gundling realises that he's been kidding himself when clinging to the belief he could shame FW into doing the right thing now and then as a justification for staying around.) Gundling can't resist having a go at Rottembourg (who is written as a snobbish French aristocrat) with comments about how France fears the written and spoken word that clearly are meant for FW as well, and while Rottembourg loses the verbal duel, FW ends the encounter by saying he'll have to publish an edict against evil atheists like this Voltaire person (FW isn't into differentiation about Deism), and Gundling will write it for him.
Which Gundling is now too afraid not to do, and so he loses the last bit of his intellectual integrity he's been proud of. The other Pyrrhic victory is when FW presents him with David Fassmann as his potential sucessor, Fassmann (who has never met FW and wants the job) taunts Gundling and Gundling loses it and starts to beat on Fassmann. But now he's done just what all the others from the Tabagcie which he despised for being unable to answer verbal arguments except by brutal force has done, and that was the last moral differentiation he's been clinging to, and he's lost that as well. From this point onwards, all that's left is drinking himself to death. The last few pages are written in a hallucinatory style, with Gundling no longer able to tell what is reall and what isn't ("did I talk with the King about the Crown Prince?" is one of two Fritz mentions in this novel; the other is when Gundling briefly spots child Fritz and thinks he reminds him of a little caged bird), and where he comes up with an image summarizing everything: He sees the King who holds up a mirror to him, the mirror showing Gundling himself as he's now, in his entire degredation. But he also notices the King uses this mirror which shows Gundling like a shield, to avoid having to look at himself.
(Let me add here that one of the elements that make this book better than "Der Meister von Sanssouci" is that FW always feels like a character, one particular person, not someone who as an absolute monarch is bound to play a certain role by historic necessity. What FW does are his own actions; Gundling as the narrator never says, well, Kings, you, know, but progress marches on! That's what I mean by this novel not being orthodox.
Gundling's death is his final escape, when he is at least free of fear and pain and feels that curiosity again he had as a boy when he wanted to learn everything and wanted to understand and find out all the reasons, and when he understands that, he's free.
Now, the movie: script by Ulrich Plenzdorf, who wrote "Die neuen Leiden des jungen W.", the modern Werther novel which I read in school. There are, of course, a lot less characters (the novel even includes vivid cameos even by F1's ceremonial master von Besser, and by August the Strong when he's visiting Berlin), events like the bears do not happen (presumably because it would be way too dangerous to film that; also this is a German tv movie, and we don't have the budget for Hollywood trained stunt bears!) , the humiliation conga that Gundling observes and too late realises foreshadows his own is limited to just the female snitch showing up, not her husband (there are a few other examples in the novel); all these cuts are understandable, and they make room for fleshing out Anne de Larrey and her relationship with Gundling, which imo was really needed. So in the movie, we see how they connect, that she's kind and clever and that he's able to charm her by being witty without being cruel, and the marriage becomes the FW free space in his life, but alas too late to save him. As the movie is not told in the first person, we're in Anne's pov for the last section and at the funeral, where Fassmann holds the funeral speech. (The director and the actor didn't let Fassmann do this mockingly but suddenly fully aware he's next, and thus terrified.)
Another difference between movie and novel is something which I did miss, and that's letting Gundling actively work to get a job from FW. In the film, he gets fired after F1's death, he's on his way to leave Berlin when he's called back because FW has found out he's written that essay about manufactoring; there is no indication that Gundling tried to make this happen. Also, he doesn't laugh with the others early on in the Tobacco Parliament; he's thus presented entirely as an innocent there, and the way the evolving group dynamic happens is observed by him strictly from the outside, not form the inside. . (Plus where the novel has three different cases, of which the female snitch and her husband are but one, the movie has only the one, where, as I said, Gundling remains serious.) The film thus loses some complexity in its main character, though it has an invention later on to bring some of that back - the rebeillious students with whom Gundling has hung out in Breslau show up at his doorstep when he' married and has his own town residence, and he doesn't have the courage anymore to offer them sanctuary, not when his own welfare and that of Anne and her dead brother's children whom she has adopted are at stake. Still, not the same.
However, and it's a big however: the two leads are outstanding. Wolfgang Kieling as Gundling has a tragic dignity that goes with an increasing fragility despite not being a fragilly built man, a great voice and a way to convey so much with his acting of what's going on inside Gundling at any given point. And Götz George as FW is hands down the best FW I've yet seen on screen, which includes Günter Strack in Der Thronfolger. He feels like a living live wire, with an incredible energy barely hold in check and never falls into metaphorical moustache twirling or hammy acting, which makes scenes when FW goes from relatively harmless to doing something cruel way more effective. The script also trusts its audience to get the point without someone putting a sledge hammer on it as when FW on the one hand tells child!Fritz (in his one and only scene) that wars of agression are evil and on the other in the next breath goes on to bully people some more. That both novel and movie keep out the other Hohenzollerns as much as they can and focus on FW strictly in the context of his relationship with Gundling also makes the story as the absolutely perfect counterpoint to anyone pulling out the "well, 1730 and his relationship with his oldest son aside, he was really good!" argument. Both book and movie don't offer a final explanation as to why FW does what he does to Gundling - Gundling has an opinion about this, of course, but in the novel he's the pov character who offers this opinion, and in the film we only briefly see FW (twice) when Gundling isn't around, either). But what he does is the systematic destruction of a human being, that's made crystal clear in both versions (the film makes it even more literal in that the gigantic barrel of wine in which Gundling will later be buried is literally full of wine when it arrives so Gundling can drink himself do death on it, and does, while Anne is kept away from his bedroom by two soldiers), and that he does this is its own judgment on him.
Coming up when I can: screencaps!