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.
Coming up when I can: screencaps!
Edited 2021-03-16 13:02 (UTC)
Re: Book Review II: Der König und sein Narr (Novel and Film)
Definitely sounds like it, yeah. I only knew bits and pieces and the general gist of Gundling's story, so a lot of the details were new to me, including the kidnapping by Old Dessauer and the burial circumstances. Damn.
Re: Book Review II: Der König und sein Narr (Novel and Film)
Re: burial circumstances, having now read the non-fiction book on Gundling, I can tell you that this is another case - like Oncker with the Knyphausen-derived FW quote about Fritz - of 19th and early 20th century historians refusing to accept reality if it didn't fit with their idea of a character. For lo and behold, this happened:
David Fassmann in his Gundling-Mocking diatribe, among many other things: The King buried him in a barrel of wine.
Wilhelmine, in a letter to her sister Friederike (who was already married to Ansbach) from 1731: "The King had him buried in his beautiful robe and his gigantic wig in a barrel. He himself accompagnied the body till Borndstädt, where (Gundling) was buried."
Later Hohenzollern fan historians: Fassmann was a satirist and Wilhelmine is a Dad-hating liar. No way super Christian Protestant FW would have made a mockery of a funeral like that, having Gundling buried in in a wine barrel, letting his arch enemy hold the taunting burial speech. No way!
So we get from Louis Schneider, 1867, writing an essay "Ist Gundling in einem Weinfasse begraben worden?" to the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (frequent wiki source, though not for the Gundling entry) from 1878 claiming that the doubts as to whether the mocking inscriptions on Gundlings coffin really were put there", to the Neue Deutsche Biographie from 1966 declaring that "especially the infamous burial of Gundling in a barrel of wine can't have happened in this form".
THEN, someone has the bright idea of checking for records of the people professionally concerned with burials, to wit, the clergy. And lo! In the archive of the Franckesche Stiftungen in Halle, there's a letter from Potsdam Reverend Johann Heinrich Schubert, written only five days after Gundling's burial. Which not only backs up the wine barrel tale 100% but also proves poor Gundling in his dying days knew FW wouldn't even let him be buried in peace. Writes Schubert: Poor Gundling has told me among many sighs and lamentations how he has been abused, and lamented especially that due to his distress over the fact he would be buried in a barrel with such an inscription could not properly collect himself. (For to face his death calmly, that is.) (Remember, that barrel with the inscription had to stand in the same room with the dying man.) Continues Reverend Schubert:
On the 8th of this month (April) I visited him, and departed from him rather sadly because of this matter. R(ex) learns of this and questions me on the 9th, why I went so sadly from Gundling? I replied that I regretted very much being unable to soothe the man's distress in his soul, and was begging R(ex) most humbly to have pity in the poor soul and give (Gundling) the assurance that he would be buried like other people. But alas! This petition has been received most uncharitably.
There are other documents from clergymen, too, because originally FW had demanded one of them hold the funeral. Five Lutheran Pastors (Gundling was originally from Nuremberg and thus not a Calvinist) teamed up, led by Pfarrer Schultze, Schubert the letter writer, and the preacher from St. Nikolai (which was the parish where Gundling would be buried), and decided to "rather suffer everything" than obey FW's instruction to participate in such a funeral. They told FW they'd be happy to bless and preach over Gundling's coffin as long as it was a proper coffin, as every Christian had a right to, not a wine barrel. FW then threatened that he'd get the Calvinist clergy to do it instead, but the Lutherans didn't back down, and so it turned out FW had bluffed, because the Calvinists refused to go along with this horrible mockery of a funeral, either. FW then had a colonel tell the clergymen "Wollen die Priester nicht mitgehen u(nd) haben Bedenken, so mögen sie zu hause bleiben."
Not having a preacher for the funeral rites, he then told Fassmann to do it.
Later historians: FW WOULD NEVER!
Re: Book Review II: Der König und sein Narr (Novel and Film)
No way super Christian Protestant FW would have made a mockery of a funeral like that
To be honest, my thoughts took a similar direction - not as emphatically of course, but I did wonder how FW reconciled such a mockery of a funeral with his faith, going against all the preachers to boot. Schubert's report is just depressing in the relentlessness it depicts; or as you so chillingly put it: the "systematic destruction of a human being" until his last breath (and even after).
But hey, I had no idea Gundling was buried in Bornstedt! I've visited both the church and the graveyard and remember Lenné's grave for example, but not Grundling's. ... aha, googling tells me he was actually buried inside the church and I definitely missed the plate that was initially put over his grave and is now mounted on a wall.
And I see that Manger was buried there as well (outside), as was De Catt (whose grave doesn't exist anymore, so there's only a commemorative plaque).
Re: Book Review II: Der König und sein Narr (Novel and Film)
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.
Re: Book Review II: Der König und sein Narr (Novel and Film)
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.
Exactly what came to mind for me as well.
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.
Blanning would have me believe that the King of Prussia was at least in some sense head of the church in Prussia, because lo:
[Fritz] also enjoyed reminding his subjects that constitutionally he was the head of both the Lutheran and the Reformed (Calvinist) churches in his dominions. Adjudicating a petition from a man refused permission by the church authorities to marry his widowed aunt, he wrote: “The Consistory is an ass. As Vicar of Jesus Christ and Archbishop of Magdeburg, I decree that the couple shall be joined together in holy matrimony.” The parishioners of a Pomeranian village who asked for the dismissal of a pastor who did not believe in the resurrection of the body were told that on the Day of Judgment it was up to him if he wished to just lie there prostrate while everyone else got up. Ordering the reappointment of a pastor dismissed because his parishioners objected to his preaching against the eternity of Hell, he commented that if they wished to be damned for all eternity, he had nothing against it. And so on.
Quoted for Fritz snark. :D
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.
I agree completely. We've talked about how Peter Keith, younger son of minor nobility with no living father and no prominent relatives, would have gotten hanged instead of beheaded, and most likely tortured beforehand.
Re: Book Review II: Der König und sein Narr (Novel and Film)
and decided to "rather suffer everything" than obey FW's instruction to participate in such a funeral.
Man, I'm cheering for the Lutheran pastors over here. They seem to be the heroes of FW's time, what with a) not going along with Gundling's funeral b) telling him he can't actually force Wilhelmine to marry someone c) that guy who was like "well Katte was a martyr actually." I suppose maybe they weren't the same pastors, and maybe I'm getting slanted stories, but I feel like I don't see many other stories about people standing up to FW. I suppose the fact that they had a sort of ecclesiastical authority over him, where no one else could claim to any sort of authority over him, helped, but still.
Re: Book Review II: Der König und sein Narr (Novel and Film)
Sabrow is also cheering for the Lutheran pastors and saying they truly acted in the spirits of Luther's "Here I am, I can do no other". Given they didn't get any public praise for standing up to FW in this regard (or in the Wilhelmine matter, and no one but Hans Heinrich - we hope - read the letter where Hans Herrmann is near explicitly called a martyr), and given that we only know this because their letters written immediately after the events in question survived, not because some writer claimed they did decades later , I think it's save to say that yes, that's what they did, and they deserve the applause.
Re: Book Review II: Der König und sein Narr (Novel and Film)
I hope to have time to comment more on your other writeups soon, but this one I had to first because it sounds excellent, fascinating, and horrifying! and I think generally speaking I would really enjoy it -- though right now I'm not sure I would be up for reading something quite so dark, even if my German was good enough or I enlisted mildred's help, so thank you, Royal Reader, for reading it and for the detailed analysis :)
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.
Wooooow. Yeah, that's the most heartbreaking and tragic kind of tragedy, where one sees how one's own actions bear some weight in one's downfall (although of course no one deserves Gundling's fate, so I'm glad it never veers into that territory).
Can you keep your integrity and your art while accomodating absolute power?
*nods* That sounds like a fascinating thematic thread and also... well... the answer is "no" when we're talking about FW :P (Only I guess it wasn't quite "no" for Morgenstern, huh.)
he too, joined everyone else's laughter, unable to realise he was looking at his own future.
Oh man, I'm seeing that screenshot you took of Fassmann in the film. Brrrrr.
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
That is just chilling and fascinating.
(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.)
Ouch, and that rings very true as a sort of self-justification.
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.
This is, indeed, super harrowing. But also so interesting in the way, like you say, that he is complicit in his own destruction (even though he's not the principal architect of it).
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.
I have all kinds of mixed feelings about this :( I guess we'll say i'm glad he escaped. Sort of.
(The director and the actor didn't let Fassmann do this mockingly but suddenly fully aware he's next, and thus terrified.)
Which I think is a great choice.
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.
*nods* I felt this way when you first told me about Gundling. I think it's possible that nothing else FW has done -- yes, even Katte -- has bothered me quite as much. (ALSO. BEARS. WHO DOES THAT.) I'm really glad that Stade wrote this book and that Gundling got his own story, even if hundreds of years too late for him.
Re: Book Review II: Der König und sein Narr (Novel and Film)
Yeah, that's the most heartbreaking and tragic kind of tragedy, where one sees how one's own actions bear some weight in one's downfall (although of course no one deserves Gundling's fate, so I'm glad it never veers into that territory).
Yes, it can be a tricky balance to get right, but I think the novel does. And of ocurse, this is how Aristotle himself defined the hero of a tragedy - someone whose misfortunes came to be through a mixture of exterior circumtance and his own flaws.
I think it's possible that nothing else FW has done -- yes, even Katte -- has bothered me quite as much.
It's not a competition, but to me it feels in many ways so, too. Perhaps because Katte at least was surrounded by people sympathetic and respectful to him when he died, he had a last encounter with Fritz, he was at peace with his faith (according to what we can know anyway), he knew he would be remembered with love and respect. Whereas Gundling had to stare at a wine barrel bearing a mocking inscription for the last week of his life knowing he would be buried in it, and FW would not stop tormenting him even in the grave. As opposed to the film, his wife was allowed to be with him until he died, but the moment he had taken his last breath (April 11th ten am), she was sent back to Berlin (he didn't die in his own house in Berlin but at the palace in Potsdam where he had had the misfortune of falling sick - this is why FW was informed the preacher had looked sad when leaving him etc.) so she wouldn't be in the way of the grotesquery that unfolded. As soon as the autopsy was done, he was laid out for a wake in the godawful costume for the entire court to mock, and then the barrel etc. There is just a relentless lack of pity and humanity there which isn't even the case with Katte, and that's why it hits me deepest.
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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!
Re: Book Review II: Der König und sein Narr (Novel and Film)
Definitely sounds like it, yeah. I only knew bits and pieces and the general gist of Gundling's story, so a lot of the details were new to me, including the kidnapping by Old Dessauer and the burial circumstances. Damn.
Re: Book Review II: Der König und sein Narr (Novel and Film)
David Fassmann in his Gundling-Mocking diatribe, among many other things: The King buried him in a barrel of wine.
Wilhelmine, in a letter to her sister Friederike (who was already married to Ansbach) from 1731: "The King had him buried in his beautiful robe and his gigantic wig in a barrel. He himself accompagnied the body till Borndstädt, where (Gundling) was buried."
Later Hohenzollern fan historians: Fassmann was a satirist and Wilhelmine is a Dad-hating liar. No way super Christian Protestant FW would have made a mockery of a funeral like that, having Gundling buried in in a wine barrel, letting his arch enemy hold the taunting burial speech. No way!
So we get from Louis Schneider, 1867, writing an essay "Ist Gundling in einem Weinfasse begraben worden?" to the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (frequent wiki source, though not for the Gundling entry) from 1878 claiming that the doubts as to whether the mocking inscriptions on Gundlings coffin really were put there", to the Neue Deutsche Biographie from 1966 declaring that "especially the infamous burial of Gundling in a barrel of wine can't have happened in this form".
THEN, someone has the bright idea of checking for records of the people professionally concerned with burials, to wit, the clergy. And lo! In the archive of the Franckesche Stiftungen in Halle, there's a letter from Potsdam Reverend Johann Heinrich Schubert, written only five days after Gundling's burial. Which not only backs up the wine barrel tale 100% but also proves poor Gundling in his dying days knew FW wouldn't even let him be buried in peace. Writes Schubert: Poor Gundling has told me among many sighs and lamentations how he has been abused, and lamented especially that due to his distress over the fact he would be buried in a barrel with such an inscription could not properly collect himself. (For to face his death calmly, that is.) (Remember, that barrel with the inscription had to stand in the same room with the dying man.) Continues Reverend Schubert:
On the 8th of this month (April) I visited him, and departed from him rather sadly because of this matter. R(ex) learns of this and questions me on the 9th, why I went so sadly from Gundling? I replied that I regretted very much being unable to soothe the man's distress in his soul, and was begging R(ex) most humbly to have pity in the poor soul and give (Gundling) the assurance that he would be buried like other people. But alas! This petition has been received most uncharitably.
There are other documents from clergymen, too, because originally FW had demanded one of them hold the funeral. Five Lutheran Pastors (Gundling was originally from Nuremberg and thus not a Calvinist) teamed up, led by Pfarrer Schultze, Schubert the letter writer, and the preacher from St. Nikolai (which was the parish where Gundling would be buried), and decided to "rather suffer everything" than obey FW's instruction to participate in such a funeral. They told FW they'd be happy to bless and preach over Gundling's coffin as long as it was a proper coffin, as every Christian had a right to, not a wine barrel. FW then threatened that he'd get the Calvinist clergy to do it instead, but the Lutherans didn't back down, and so it turned out FW had bluffed, because the Calvinists refused to go along with this horrible mockery of a funeral, either. FW then had a colonel tell the clergymen "Wollen die Priester nicht mitgehen u(nd) haben Bedenken, so mögen sie zu hause bleiben."
Not having a preacher for the funeral rites, he then told Fassmann to do it.
Later historians: FW WOULD NEVER!
Re: Book Review II: Der König und sein Narr (Novel and Film)
To be honest, my thoughts took a similar direction - not as emphatically of course, but I did wonder how FW reconciled such a mockery of a funeral with his faith, going against all the preachers to boot. Schubert's report is just depressing in the relentlessness it depicts; or as you so chillingly put it: the "systematic destruction of a human being" until his last breath (and even after).
But hey, I had no idea Gundling was buried in Bornstedt! I've visited both the church and the graveyard and remember Lenné's grave for example, but not Grundling's. ... aha, googling tells me he was actually buried inside the church and I definitely missed the plate that was initially put over his grave and is now mounted on a wall.
And I see that Manger was buried there as well (outside), as was De Catt (whose grave doesn't exist anymore, so there's only a commemorative plaque).
Re: Book Review II: Der König und sein Narr (Novel and Film)
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.
Re: Book Review II: Der König und sein Narr (Novel and Film)
Exactly what came to mind for me as well.
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.
Blanning would have me believe that the King of Prussia was at least in some sense head of the church in Prussia, because lo:
[Fritz] also enjoyed reminding his subjects that constitutionally he was the head of both the Lutheran and the Reformed (Calvinist) churches in his dominions. Adjudicating a petition from a man refused permission by the church authorities to marry his widowed aunt, he wrote: “The Consistory is an ass. As Vicar of Jesus Christ and Archbishop of Magdeburg, I decree that the couple shall be joined together in holy matrimony.” The parishioners of a Pomeranian village who asked for the dismissal of a pastor who did not believe in the resurrection of the body were told that on the Day of Judgment it was up to him if he wished to just lie there prostrate while everyone else got up. Ordering the reappointment of a pastor dismissed because his parishioners objected to his preaching against the eternity of Hell, he commented that if they wished to be damned for all eternity, he had nothing against it. And so on.
Quoted for Fritz snark. :D
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.
I agree completely. We've talked about how Peter Keith, younger son of minor nobility with no living father and no prominent relatives, would have gotten hanged instead of beheaded, and most likely tortured beforehand.
Re: Book Review II: Der König und sein Narr (Novel and Film)
Man, I'm cheering for the Lutheran pastors over here. They seem to be the heroes of FW's time, what with a) not going along with Gundling's funeral b) telling him he can't actually force Wilhelmine to marry someone c) that guy who was like "well Katte was a martyr actually." I suppose maybe they weren't the same pastors, and maybe I'm getting slanted stories, but I feel like I don't see many other stories about people standing up to FW. I suppose the fact that they had a sort of ecclesiastical authority over him, where no one else could claim to any sort of authority over him, helped, but still.
Re: Book Review II: Der König und sein Narr (Novel and Film)
Re: Book Review II: Der König und sein Narr (Novel and Film)
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.
Wooooow. Yeah, that's the most heartbreaking and tragic kind of tragedy, where one sees how one's own actions bear some weight in one's downfall (although of course no one deserves Gundling's fate, so I'm glad it never veers into that territory).
Can you keep your integrity and your art while accomodating absolute power?
*nods* That sounds like a fascinating thematic thread and also... well... the answer is "no" when we're talking about FW :P (Only I guess it wasn't quite "no" for Morgenstern, huh.)
he too, joined everyone else's laughter, unable to realise he was looking at his own future.
Oh man, I'm seeing that screenshot you took of Fassmann in the film. Brrrrr.
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
That is just chilling and fascinating.
(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.)
Ouch, and that rings very true as a sort of self-justification.
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.
This is, indeed, super harrowing. But also so interesting in the way, like you say, that he is complicit in his own destruction (even though he's not the principal architect of it).
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.
I have all kinds of mixed feelings about this :( I guess we'll say i'm glad he escaped. Sort of.
(The director and the actor didn't let Fassmann do this mockingly but suddenly fully aware he's next, and thus terrified.)
Which I think is a great choice.
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.
*nods* I felt this way when you first told me about Gundling. I think it's possible that nothing else FW has done -- yes, even Katte -- has bothered me quite as much. (ALSO. BEARS. WHO DOES THAT.) I'm really glad that Stade wrote this book and that Gundling got his own story, even if hundreds of years too late for him.
Re: Book Review II: Der König und sein Narr (Novel and Film)
Yes, it can be a tricky balance to get right, but I think the novel does. And of ocurse, this is how Aristotle himself defined the hero of a tragedy - someone whose misfortunes came to be through a mixture of exterior circumtance and his own flaws.
I think it's possible that nothing else FW has done -- yes, even Katte -- has bothered me quite as much.
It's not a competition, but to me it feels in many ways so, too. Perhaps because Katte at least was surrounded by people sympathetic and respectful to him when he died, he had a last encounter with Fritz, he was at peace with his faith (according to what we can know anyway), he knew he would be remembered with love and respect. Whereas Gundling had to stare at a wine barrel bearing a mocking inscription for the last week of his life knowing he would be buried in it, and FW would not stop tormenting him even in the grave. As opposed to the film, his wife was allowed to be with him until he died, but the moment he had taken his last breath (April 11th ten am), she was sent back to Berlin (he didn't die in his own house in Berlin but at the palace in Potsdam where he had had the misfortune of falling sick - this is why FW was informed the preacher had looked sad when leaving him etc.) so she wouldn't be in the way of the grotesquery that unfolded. As soon as the autopsy was done, he was laid out for a wake in the godawful costume for the entire court to mock, and then the barrel etc. There is just a relentless lack of pity and humanity there which isn't even the case with Katte, and that's why it hits me deepest.