cahn

Ah, thank you for linking the plate! Sabrow (the biographer) mentions it, but the black and white photo in the book doesn't show it as well. The two figures on each side are a hare and Athena/Minerva, which sums up Gundling's double existence, for the hare is an allusion to the 18th century term "haselieren" for "playing the fool", while Minerva of course is the goddess of wisdom. Sabrow's book otherwise offers a bit more light for Gundling, in that he managed to continue his life as a scholar - he had an enormous output on books written during those years which is one of the reasons why Sabrow doubts his alcoholic input was actually more than what FW, Grumbkow and Seckendorff drank, because having read the books, he says they demanded an enormous amount on focus and concentration, as a great deal is original research work. And while FW made him head of the acedemy to humiliate the academy, Gundling took that job seriously, attended his first Academy session three days after FW appointed him and his last in 1730, i.e. months before his death. Sabrow says that since FW insisted on his presence whereever FW was, he couldn't attend on more than key sessions, i.e. whenn new members were suggested/appointed or when changes were made), but those he was always there for. And he initialized and pushed several projects through despite the minimum budget FW allowed for the Academy. (Which is why the Academy under Leipniz published only one volume, despite having a much, much larger budget, but two in the much shorter and minimum-budgeted Gundling era, to which he contributed several essays in one case and a preface in the other.) He couldn't realise his most ambitious project, which was a world geographical atlas, which was supposed to come about in a collaboration between different branches of scholars. (Gundling himself had mapped and written about Brandenburg and Pomerania in this detailed way.) But the point is, he took what was meant as a joke on FW's part and worked hard to make it something different, because the world of letters never ceased to mean something to him that survived all the put downs and degredations.

FW: Well, I felt reminded of him asking, in the same year, no less, the clergy wheather a man was entitled to force his daughter into marriage against her will and upon hearing that no, he wasn't, chose to ignore that. Then there was that time he frightened the preacher of the local church at Rheinsberg (not Dechamps, the local guy) to death by showing up unexpected and shaking his stick at him because he disagreed with the sermon. And let's not forget that predestination is actually standard for Calvinism, only for FW to decide that no, Luther was right on this point. Methinks if he had become King of England, he'd have taken that "supreme head of the church" title to mean that he could reorganize the Anglican church in his image.

For Sabrow, the bigger question is where this relentless persecution came from given that simultanously, FW spent hours alone with Gundling (in addition to the tobacco parliament sessions), and Seckendorff as late as the mid 1720s actually wrote to Prince Eugene that Gundling was one of the few who could get FW to change his mind on something, and that he was someone to win over if you wanted to get somewhere. Sabrow also makes a good case by presenting the relevant documents that the mocking and humiliating of Gundling doesn't start until about two years after Gundling has joined FW's service, that for the first two years, FW accepts Gundling's commercial suggestions and sends him on a cross country tour for the manufactoring cause. And yet he doesn't even have enough pity to let the man die in peace but torments him until the end and after.

This, btw, is why I think that as sad and unjust and terrible Katte's fate was, he was still within that tragedy fortunate in that he was the scion of a privileged family with a father whom FW respected. Because Gundling and Doris Ritter are examples of what happened to people whom no one championed, whom no one was interested in.