Martin Sabrow: Herr und Hanswurst. Das tragische Schicksal des Hofgelehrten Jacob Paul von Gundling from 2003 is the first proper non fiction Gundling biography in centuries, literally, and it is a really good one. The author is open from the start about the problems with the source material - the first biographical writings about Gundling were by his arch enemy David Fassmann and explicitly meant as attacks on him, the first "real" biography wasn't published until 50 years later, at which time the image of Gundling as the court fool was well set and most of the people who could have known him were dead, and the 19th century dealt with the problem that there's no way you can tell the Gundling story honestly and make FW come out well by declaring (up to and including the Hohenzollernjahrbuch in 1901) that it was really all Gundling's own fault by virtue of being a vain alcoholic, and the worst stories were clearly invented, because FW would never.
However, there is actually material to be found to work with and countercheck the anecdotal stories against. Gundling's own books, of course (not in the sense of containing autobiographical accounts but in terms of showing what he was working on at any given time, and also the dedications are interesting and telling), but also various uniiversity and clergy accounts, the "Berliner Adreß-Kalender" which shows when Gundling lived where, and the court news, which was what passed for a newspaper in FW's Berlin and are able to provide date and place for some of the most outrageous stories which one would have hoped to be invented or exaggarated, but weren't, such as the bears. There is also Gundling's brother Hieronymus who was a very respected Professor in Halle and of whom we have some letters and a last will, the records of the Academy through the FW years, and a few other statistical archive treasures. Unlike, say, the Maupertuis biographer, Sabrow manages to weave a compelling - and despite it actually offering some more minor victories for Gundling than "Der König und sein Naarr" does, heartrendering - tale out of all this. I'll limit myself to what was new to me or where he contradicts tradition.
Gundling was born the younger of two sons of a clergyman near Nuremberg. (As a commoner; the ennoblement laer happened courtesy of FW.) Unfortunately for him and his older brother Hieronymus, their parents died when they were still young, and their father didn't leave them enough money to study, which means they had to rely on sponsors. Hieronymus, the older, managed to that and having made Magister and Doctor ended up as a highly respected Professor in Halle for the rest of his life. Jacob Paul could afford uni only because he immatriculated together with a spawn of the local nobility, Tetzel, whom he was supposed to supervise and help out scholarly. When Tetzel decided he had enough of studying and wanted to do the grand tour, Gundling - with a choice that as Sabrow says was no choice at all, i.e. either continue to study without money to pay for it, or go with Tetzel on the Grand Tour and continue to be paid - did leave without getting his degree. (This is important in the long run.) Tetzel's Grand Tour included England, and Gundling may or may not have met the Archbishop of Canterbury there. (His enemy Faßmann claims he can't have done, as Gundling says they talked in Latin due to Gundling's bit of English learned en route not being up to a conversation, and, Faßmann says, it's impossible to talk with Brits in Latin because they pronounce it wrong. Sabrow is not mpressed with this argument, but says this doesn't mean Gundling actually met the guy. We just don't know. It's worth pointing out that his later wife spent some of her formative years in England, though, and that he'd been there for a while might have helped forming a connection between them.)
After Tetzel had finished his tour, he didn't return to university and dismissed Gundling, who finished the rest of his education in the do it yourself manner, but with results that produced a book about Prussian state history that was impressive enough to get him hired by F1's people. Leipniz himself thought young Gundling good enough to want him for the Academy, but the other members voted against it because Gundling had not finished his degree properly, and was only a Professor by royal appointment. Still, Gundling settled down in Berlin, started to do heraldic work (which was the job) and research for histories (what he wanted to do) and eventually write that fateful essay about commerce and manufacturing with reform ideas.
F1 dies, FW starts his austerity program. Here comes the first big divergence to tradition. Now, Faßmann claimed - and all subsequent biographers, including FW biographers like Förster -, followed him in this, that a fired and thus homeless Gundling settled down in one of the local taverns, got drunk and entertained people by reading the news to them, which alterted none other than Grumbkow to his existence, who was on the look out for a newsreader for FW, Gundling shows up, gets hired, and immediately gets humiliated. Sabrow demonstrates that this is telescoping and inventing from the pov of someone who only came into the King's orbit in 1726. Firstly, the tavern where Grumbkow supposedly spotted a drunken Gundling didn't exist yet in the year of FW's ascension and for several more years to come. Secondly, far from lodging in a tavern, the Berlin Address Book shows Gundling going from living at the Ritterakademie (the one in charge of the genealogiies which FW dissolved) to, after a year of interruption, living with Kammergerichtsrat Plarre in the Mittelstraße, Dorotheenstadt, where he'll stay for the next five years. Plarren had a first class library which Gundling actually managed to talk FW into acquiring for the Prussian State when Plarre died in 1717.
About the missing year: in Gundling's years later written and published detailed mapping of Brandenburg and Pomerania, he mentions, in the preface/dedication, having been sent to inspect Brandenburg manufacturing back then and have gotten the job through Gumbkow, to whom the volume is dedicated. Could this be a euphemism? Sure, except that the court news from September 30 1713 also mention Gundling in this context ("Der Herr Rath Gundling hat von Brandenburg referiret, daß er daselbst feine blaue Tücher zu 3 Taler wehrt fabricieret gefunden hätte" etc.), and what the court news notably don't report at this point are any of the later humiliations which will show up frequently in years to come in their reporting. Which is why Sabrow arrives at the conclusion that yes, Gundling, having lost his original job in Berlin, did get a new and respectable one from FW via Grumbkow by virtue of that reforms suggesting essay. What's more, it's also documented that he made the suggestion to discontinue allowing every little estate to brew their beer according to their own standards but to introduce a single state standard which the breweries had to adher to, which made a lot of nobility hate his gut because it essentially created both state control and a state monopoly on said quality control; FW, though, was delighted. But if the start was so promising, how did we get to the horrible tragedy to ensue? Sabrow finds the turning point in the late winter of 1714, which is when the first "prank" story shows up, the one with the ghosts.
Now to us it may sound relatively harmless compared to what's to come, but the key point here is that according to the court news Gundling hadn't just lectured the Tobacco Parliament on ghosts not existing but that he had "professed atheism". And then the gang managed to frighten him with fake ghosts. This wasn't just a loss of face; in a system where FW had made Manly Courage such a big standard to achieve, it marked Gundling as a coward, and resulted in an instant loss of respect from FW. What's more, the noblemen of the Tobacco College probably already either hated his gut for the beer issue or they resented a commoner upstart among them. That's when the court news starts to report he's been forced to drink, not just alcohol but purges, has been forced out of his clothes and into the court fools, and so on and so forth. Gundling then makes his first flight attempt (to his brother in Halle) in 1716, which doesn't last long. Halle is still Prussian territory, and brother Hieronymus fears for his own job. (He's also unhappily married and a father, which becomes a plot point much later.) So Gundling returns, and tries to avoid the court as much as he can, at one point even hiding with SD, who helps him. (!) "As the Queen was worried that the old comedy would be played with this man, she pretended he wasn't there but absent when he was sent for." Alas, though, FW sees through her. He appoints Gundling to Geheimer Rat on August 17 1716 and in September 1716 court news agent Ortgies reports FW ordering Gundling, who had tried to refuse joining a hunting expedition, to be beaten up with a hunting dagger. On October 10th 1716, the bears happen. The court news report that Gundling was led into a chamber "where the King keeps some young bears, and several fire crackers were thrown in through a window by which such beasts were irritated, so much so that the man had great trouble to defend himself against them and the crackers."
(This version is even worse than the one from Morgenstern, because of the additional fireworks to upset the bears.)
While the horror show you're already familiar with is going on, there's this weird parallel aspect Sabrow points out, i.e. that Gundling simultanously is the butt of everyone's jokes and seen as a person of influence. ON Johann Michael von Loen, who was a student of Gundling's brother Hieronymus and later spent the winter 1717/1718 in Berlin, notes both that "the King wanted to give his soldiers a scholar as a a spectacle" in order "for Gundling to be laughed at by the entire court", but also that "he often spends entire hours locked up alone with the King in his cabinet, writes and works when with him, so he can be useful to many and damaging to some." None other than Seckendorff in his reports to Prince Eugene agrees. (Not just early on. He writes as late as 1727 that "the well known Geheimrat Gundling sits both at the lunch table and in the evening in the Tobacco College and reads the newspapers for the table, and then there repeated sharp remarks about Hanover", which is useful to Seckendorff, of course. Which is why in addition to the usual bribery money for Gumbkow which was due, he wants from Eugene bribery material for Gundling, to wit: "Not a golden necklaces but an imperial medaillon set with diamonds, for they consider it a far greater honor here to distribute medaillons than to distribute necklaces, since the later are even given to ordinary couriers, whereas the former are given to people of some distinction."
Then there's the Preacher Freylinghausen, known to us because he observes kid AW begging for the life of a deserter as you might recall. On another occasion, when he visits Wusterhausen in 1727, he's seated at the table between Gundling on one side and Fritz on the other, while SD sits opposite them. Since Freylinghausen isn't a nobleman or a military m an, he has an entirely peaceful conversation with Gundling about the work of the theological faculty in Halle, reccomends a mathematician to Gundling as a candidate for the Academy and then they talk about what they're read about the coronation of G2 in England which happened that year. Freylingshausen's report contains nothing derogative about Gundling; he talks about him just as a scholar whom he has had a good conversation with. Sabrow constrasts this almost en famille picture with what happens in the same month when Gundling isn't a guest at a family meal but in the tobacco college where the other guests are all military: his wig is set on fire.
Martin Sabrow's Gundling Biography: I
However, there is actually material to be found to work with and countercheck the anecdotal stories against. Gundling's own books, of course (not in the sense of containing autobiographical accounts but in terms of showing what he was working on at any given time, and also the dedications are interesting and telling), but also various uniiversity and clergy accounts, the "Berliner Adreß-Kalender" which shows when Gundling lived where, and the court news, which was what passed for a newspaper in FW's Berlin and are able to provide date and place for some of the most outrageous stories which one would have hoped to be invented or exaggarated, but weren't, such as the bears. There is also Gundling's brother Hieronymus who was a very respected Professor in Halle and of whom we have some letters and a last will, the records of the Academy through the FW years, and a few other statistical archive treasures. Unlike, say, the Maupertuis biographer, Sabrow manages to weave a compelling - and despite it actually offering some more minor victories for Gundling than "Der König und sein Naarr" does, heartrendering - tale out of all this. I'll limit myself to what was new to me or where he contradicts tradition.
Gundling was born the younger of two sons of a clergyman near Nuremberg. (As a commoner; the ennoblement laer happened courtesy of FW.) Unfortunately for him and his older brother Hieronymus, their parents died when they were still young, and their father didn't leave them enough money to study, which means they had to rely on sponsors. Hieronymus, the older, managed to that and having made Magister and Doctor ended up as a highly respected Professor in Halle for the rest of his life. Jacob Paul could afford uni only because he immatriculated together with a spawn of the local nobility, Tetzel, whom he was supposed to supervise and help out scholarly. When Tetzel decided he had enough of studying and wanted to do the grand tour, Gundling - with a choice that as Sabrow says was no choice at all, i.e. either continue to study without money to pay for it, or go with Tetzel on the Grand Tour and continue to be paid - did leave without getting his degree. (This is important in the long run.) Tetzel's Grand Tour included England, and Gundling may or may not have met the Archbishop of Canterbury there. (His enemy Faßmann claims he can't have done, as Gundling says they talked in Latin due to Gundling's bit of English learned en route not being up to a conversation, and, Faßmann says, it's impossible to talk with Brits in Latin because they pronounce it wrong. Sabrow is not mpressed with this argument, but says this doesn't mean Gundling actually met the guy. We just don't know. It's worth pointing out that his later wife spent some of her formative years in England, though, and that he'd been there for a while might have helped forming a connection between them.)
After Tetzel had finished his tour, he didn't return to university and dismissed Gundling, who finished the rest of his education in the do it yourself manner, but with results that produced a book about Prussian state history that was impressive enough to get him hired by F1's people. Leipniz himself thought young Gundling good enough to want him for the Academy, but the other members voted against it because Gundling had not finished his degree properly, and was only a Professor by royal appointment. Still, Gundling settled down in Berlin, started to do heraldic work (which was the job) and research for histories (what he wanted to do) and eventually write that fateful essay about commerce and manufacturing with reform ideas.
F1 dies, FW starts his austerity program. Here comes the first big divergence to tradition. Now, Faßmann claimed - and all subsequent biographers, including FW biographers like Förster -, followed him in this, that a fired and thus homeless Gundling settled down in one of the local taverns, got drunk and entertained people by reading the news to them, which alterted none other than Grumbkow to his existence, who was on the look out for a newsreader for FW, Gundling shows up, gets hired, and immediately gets humiliated. Sabrow demonstrates that this is telescoping and inventing from the pov of someone who only came into the King's orbit in 1726. Firstly, the tavern where Grumbkow supposedly spotted a drunken Gundling didn't exist yet in the year of FW's ascension and for several more years to come. Secondly, far from lodging in a tavern, the Berlin Address Book shows Gundling going from living at the Ritterakademie (the one in charge of the genealogiies which FW dissolved) to, after a year of interruption, living with Kammergerichtsrat Plarre in the Mittelstraße, Dorotheenstadt, where he'll stay for the next five years. Plarren had a first class library which Gundling actually managed to talk FW into acquiring for the Prussian State when Plarre died in 1717.
About the missing year: in Gundling's years later written and published detailed mapping of Brandenburg and Pomerania, he mentions, in the preface/dedication, having been sent to inspect Brandenburg manufacturing back then and have gotten the job through Gumbkow, to whom the volume is dedicated. Could this be a euphemism? Sure, except that the court news from September 30 1713 also mention Gundling in this context ("Der Herr Rath Gundling hat von Brandenburg referiret, daß er daselbst feine blaue Tücher zu 3 Taler wehrt fabricieret gefunden hätte" etc.), and what the court news notably don't report at this point are any of the later humiliations which will show up frequently in years to come in their reporting. Which is why Sabrow arrives at the conclusion that yes, Gundling, having lost his original job in Berlin, did get a new and respectable one from FW via Grumbkow by virtue of that reforms suggesting essay. What's more, it's also documented that he made the suggestion to discontinue allowing every little estate to brew their beer according to their own standards but to introduce a single state standard which the breweries had to adher to, which made a lot of nobility hate his gut because it essentially created both state control and a state monopoly on said quality control; FW, though, was delighted. But if the start was so promising, how did we get to the horrible tragedy to ensue? Sabrow finds the turning point in the late winter of 1714, which is when the first "prank" story shows up, the one with the ghosts.
Now to us it may sound relatively harmless compared to what's to come, but the key point here is that according to the court news Gundling hadn't just lectured the Tobacco Parliament on ghosts not existing but that he had "professed atheism". And then the gang managed to frighten him with fake ghosts. This wasn't just a loss of face; in a system where FW had made Manly Courage such a big standard to achieve, it marked Gundling as a coward, and resulted in an instant loss of respect from FW. What's more, the noblemen of the Tobacco College probably already either hated his gut for the beer issue or they resented a commoner upstart among them. That's when the court news starts to report he's been forced to drink, not just alcohol but purges, has been forced out of his clothes and into the court fools, and so on and so forth. Gundling then makes his first flight attempt (to his brother in Halle) in 1716, which doesn't last long. Halle is still Prussian territory, and brother Hieronymus fears for his own job. (He's also unhappily married and a father, which becomes a plot point much later.) So Gundling returns, and tries to avoid the court as much as he can, at one point even hiding with SD, who helps him. (!) "As the Queen was worried that the old comedy would be played with this man, she pretended he wasn't there but absent when he was sent for." Alas, though, FW sees through her. He appoints Gundling to Geheimer Rat on August 17 1716 and in September 1716 court news agent Ortgies reports FW ordering Gundling, who had tried to refuse joining a hunting expedition, to be beaten up with a hunting dagger. On October 10th 1716, the bears happen. The court news report that Gundling was led into a chamber "where the King keeps some young bears, and several fire crackers were thrown in through a window by which such beasts were irritated, so much so that the man had great trouble to defend himself against them and the crackers."
(This version is even worse than the one from Morgenstern, because of the additional fireworks to upset the bears.)
While the horror show you're already familiar with is going on, there's this weird parallel aspect Sabrow points out, i.e. that Gundling simultanously is the butt of everyone's jokes and seen as a person of influence. ON Johann Michael von Loen, who was a student of Gundling's brother Hieronymus and later spent the winter 1717/1718 in Berlin, notes both that "the King wanted to give his soldiers a scholar as a a spectacle" in order "for Gundling to be laughed at by the entire court", but also that "he often spends entire hours locked up alone with the King in his cabinet, writes and works when with him, so he can be useful to many and damaging to some." None other than Seckendorff in his reports to Prince Eugene agrees. (Not just early on. He writes as late as 1727 that "the well known Geheimrat Gundling sits both at the lunch table and in the evening in the Tobacco College and reads the newspapers for the table, and then there repeated sharp remarks about Hanover", which is useful to Seckendorff, of course. Which is why in addition to the usual bribery money for Gumbkow which was due, he wants from Eugene bribery material for Gundling, to wit: "Not a golden necklaces but an imperial medaillon set with diamonds, for they consider it a far greater honor here to distribute medaillons than to distribute necklaces, since the later are even given to ordinary couriers, whereas the former are given to people of some distinction."
Then there's the Preacher Freylinghausen, known to us because he observes kid AW begging for the life of a deserter as you might recall. On another occasion, when he visits Wusterhausen in 1727, he's seated at the table between Gundling on one side and Fritz on the other, while SD sits opposite them. Since Freylinghausen isn't a nobleman or a military m an, he has an entirely peaceful conversation with Gundling about the work of the theological faculty in Halle, reccomends a mathematician to Gundling as a candidate for the Academy and then they talk about what they're read about the coronation of G2 in England which happened that year. Freylingshausen's report contains nothing derogative about Gundling; he talks about him just as a scholar whom he has had a good conversation with. Sabrow constrasts this almost en famille picture with what happens in the same month when Gundling isn't a guest at a family meal but in the tobacco college where the other guests are all military: his wig is set on fire.