Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 27

[cahn]

Still going! :D

Comments

Re: Virtual Guided Tours

[felis]

Isn't it? Other things I loved: the close look at his velvet-covered desks for example, and Henriette Graf's dry "who'd have thought" comment re: Fritz liking the little quatrepieds because he could keep books and writing equipment in them, ha.

One additional detail: the last video in this SPSG YT playlist gives a short look at the "dark staircase" behind the marble gallery, i.e. the servant stairs between the walls. (Whereas the first video, about Auguste Victoria's quarters - I forgot that WII had the New Palais as his main residence - told me that apparently, nobody had bothered to look into a locked closet for a hundred years, and when they finally picked the lock in 2018, they found lots and lots of her 19th century family letters, which she probably forgot to take into exile.* I know the Palais is quite huge, but wow.)

*WII did of course take a lot of art and furniture with him in 1918 (the infamous 60 wagons), kept in Haus Doorn in the Netherlands to this day and including, as I've just now found out, lots of Fritz's stuff, like portraits of his friends (the Pesne ones of Jordan and Keyserlingk for example!) and many of his snuff boxes. Huh.

Re: Virtual Guided Tours

[selenak]

Given W2 called himself "A descendant" (not even a successor, a descendant) of Frederick the Great", I'm not surprised he took lots of stuff with him.

(AW: Fritz can have him as a descendant. I'm disowning him.)

Last year when I visited the Neues Palais, I was reminded that not just Willy but his parents had lived there - they show you the bed poor F3 died in, after all - , and in the recent tv movie about the end of the Empire and W2 getting forced to resign, they shot some scenes there as well.But I hadn't known about Auguste Victoria leaving all those letters behind, though!

Oh, and since I recently mentioned another Emperor F3, explanatory footnote for Mildred and cahn: There had been no HRE Emperors named Wilhelm, so Prussian King Wilhelm I. becoming German Emperor Wilhelm I. after Bismarck had engineered German unification and an Empire courtesy of a war with France was not a problem. However, his son, the one married to Queen Victoria's daughter Vicky, was a Friedrich. There had definitely been HRE Emperors named Friedrich. So the question was - would he put himself into the HRE tradition, in which case he'd have to be Friedrich IV., since there had been already an Emperor F3, the father of Max, or would he go by the Prussian monarchy counting, by which he'd be F3? Friedrich, who was already a very sick man who would die before the year was over and take any hope for a progressive Empire with him, had originally wanted to go with putting himself in the HRE tradition and be F4, but was lectured by Bismarck that this was not on, this Empire was completely different than THAT Empire. Which wasn't a battle worth fighting to a dying man. So he gave in and became F3. Which is why we now have two German Emperors Friedrich III. in our history.