Whose idea the Punctae were: my money is on Müller
Agreed, that's my thought as well..
with maybe FW having given strong hints to Müller when charging him with the task.
Maybe, but FW wrote Müller a letter saying, "I've never met you, but I've heard good things. Please try to make my son repentant, but be careful and make sure he's *really* repentant, because he's a lying liar who lies." Now, the letter (in Youth Documents in the library) ends with "...", so there may well be "and make Katte write a last letter" stuff that the editor didn't see fit to include, or there may be another letter, but I'm inclined to think FW didn't give him this task explicitly, because I would have thought the editor would include it, since it would be too relevant to Fritz to omit.
What occurs to me is that FW confronted Katte in person at his arrest, and started yelling and hitting him. I mean, I forget if that's from a reliable source, but I think it is?
He may have been yelling about flattery and Absalom and stuff to Katte, and Katte may have been inclined to try to appease FW's fears in the last letter. So it's possible he got his insights into what FW was thinking from the horse's mouth.
Katte was when all is said and done a child of his time, who in addition to said taboo may have felt guilty for the military part of his "misdeamanour", because of the Prussian Kool-Aid
Yeah, I always got the impression Katte was a partial Kool-aid drinker--like, it went against his nature but the societal forces were strong, and he was susceptible to them. The part where didn't want to join the army but did, went AWOL in England and thoght about staying but then decided to come back (and got reprimanded for going AWOL!), and tried to talk Fritz out of escaping/deserting (probably less than he claimed he did, but enough that Fritz felt the need to lie to him) but then went along with it.
Ditto Peter, who was gung-ho about escaping, went for it without hesitation, and lived a civilian life in exile, but then decided he wanted to join the British navy. But then decided he hated the navy, but liked the climate in Portugal, so he got what appears to have been a nominal position in the army while using his time to study Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian and read books. And then by 1742, had broken under the weight of Prussian Kool-aid enough to ask to be allowed to go to war, but it's not clear that he ever did, and quite clearly seems to have focused on his civilian career rather than his still as-nominal-as-possible-in-Prussia military one. (I still wonder what Peter's responsibilities as Lt. Col. in peacetime actually were: I would assume regimental parade duties, but he had to be invited specially by Fritz to attend the top-secret military parade in Spandau in 1753 as a spectator, so...)
So: as advocatus diaboli, I could make a psychological case that Katte did truly repent. However, as not to spoil your Sunday
Hahaha, no, no worries. I've always had it as my headcanon that Katte's relationship with his own father, in the society in which he was indoctrinated, was such that he felt that you *should* obey your father even if he was strict; that some of Katte's reluctance to join the cause of desertion was because he partially blamed Fritz for provoking FW; and that it took him a while for the "this is not normal strict Prussian Hausvater behavior like my father's" to outweigh "but honor thy father!" in the scales for him.
So it's just as possible Katte felt himself justified in the Lutheran sense because he'd acted on both his friend's and his future sovereign's behalf, and he had seen to much not to believe that helping Fritz in this particular situation was the only thing he could have done, in the end. After all, this is the man who minutes before his death tells Fritz there is nothing to forgive and he dies gladly for him. (Which is a different thing than dying for his sins.)
Yes, I'm always struck by the fact that Katte's final priorities were wanting to visit Fritz the night before, wanting to reassure him of his blamelessness, and wanting to blow kisses at him. It's evidence relevant not just to the question of how much he repents, but also for the nature of his relationship to Fritz: while I'm sure he was all, "Sweet, I'm all set to be in the next king's good graces like my father with Fritz's father and my grandfather with Fritz's grandfather, and it's going to pay off," he really had nothing to gain from blowing kisses at Fritz at the last minute. I mean, unless he's thinking Fritz is going to do what he would end up doing for HH and Ludolf in the 1740s, but if you were only sucking up to a royal for the benefits, I'd think you'd be a little more resentful when that sucking up led you to get your head cut off.
You know, there's the Lavisse take on it: FW had no right to try to beat Fritz's personality out of him, but teenage Fritz had no right to defy his father in return and conspire against him. If that was Katte's attitude, that would be consistent with sympathy for the abused boyfriend at very the end and also the "never do it again" Punctae.
Re: Katte psychology examined
Agreed, that's my thought as well..
with maybe FW having given strong hints to Müller when charging him with the task.
Maybe, but FW wrote Müller a letter saying, "I've never met you, but I've heard good things. Please try to make my son repentant, but be careful and make sure he's *really* repentant, because he's a lying liar who lies." Now, the letter (in Youth Documents in the library) ends with "...", so there may well be "and make Katte write a last letter" stuff that the editor didn't see fit to include, or there may be another letter, but I'm inclined to think FW didn't give him this task explicitly, because I would have thought the editor would include it, since it would be too relevant to Fritz to omit.
What occurs to me is that FW confronted Katte in person at his arrest, and started yelling and hitting him. I mean, I forget if that's from a reliable source, but I think it is?
He may have been yelling about flattery and Absalom and stuff to Katte, and Katte may have been inclined to try to appease FW's fears in the last letter. So it's possible he got his insights into what FW was thinking from the horse's mouth.
Katte was when all is said and done a child of his time, who in addition to said taboo may have felt guilty for the military part of his "misdeamanour", because of the Prussian Kool-Aid
Yeah, I always got the impression Katte was a partial Kool-aid drinker--like, it went against his nature but the societal forces were strong, and he was susceptible to them. The part where didn't want to join the army but did, went AWOL in England and thoght about staying but then decided to come back (and got reprimanded for going AWOL!), and tried to talk Fritz out of escaping/deserting (probably less than he claimed he did, but enough that Fritz felt the need to lie to him) but then went along with it.
Ditto Peter, who was gung-ho about escaping, went for it without hesitation, and lived a civilian life in exile, but then decided he wanted to join the British navy. But then decided he hated the navy, but liked the climate in Portugal, so he got what appears to have been a nominal position in the army while using his time to study Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian and read books. And then by 1742, had broken under the weight of Prussian Kool-aid enough to ask to be allowed to go to war, but it's not clear that he ever did, and quite clearly seems to have focused on his civilian career rather than his still as-nominal-as-possible-in-Prussia military one. (I still wonder what Peter's responsibilities as Lt. Col. in peacetime actually were: I would assume regimental parade duties, but he had to be invited specially by Fritz to attend the top-secret military parade in Spandau in 1753 as a spectator, so...)
So: as advocatus diaboli, I could make a psychological case that Katte did truly repent. However, as not to spoil your Sunday
Hahaha, no, no worries. I've always had it as my headcanon that Katte's relationship with his own father, in the society in which he was indoctrinated, was such that he felt that you *should* obey your father even if he was strict; that some of Katte's reluctance to join the cause of desertion was because he partially blamed Fritz for provoking FW; and that it took him a while for the "this is not normal strict Prussian Hausvater behavior like my father's" to outweigh "but honor thy father!" in the scales for him.
So it's just as possible Katte felt himself justified in the Lutheran sense because he'd acted on both his friend's and his future sovereign's behalf, and he had seen to much not to believe that helping Fritz in this particular situation was the only thing he could have done, in the end. After all, this is the man who minutes before his death tells Fritz there is nothing to forgive and he dies gladly for him. (Which is a different thing than dying for his sins.)
Yes, I'm always struck by the fact that Katte's final priorities were wanting to visit Fritz the night before, wanting to reassure him of his blamelessness, and wanting to blow kisses at him. It's evidence relevant not just to the question of how much he repents, but also for the nature of his relationship to Fritz: while I'm sure he was all, "Sweet, I'm all set to be in the next king's good graces like my father with Fritz's father and my grandfather with Fritz's grandfather, and it's going to pay off," he really had nothing to gain from blowing kisses at Fritz at the last minute. I mean, unless he's thinking Fritz is going to do what he would end up doing for HH and Ludolf in the 1740s, but if you were only sucking up to a royal for the benefits, I'd think you'd be a little more resentful when that sucking up led you to get your head cut off.
You know, there's the Lavisse take on it: FW had no right to try to beat Fritz's personality out of him, but teenage Fritz had no right to defy his father in return and conspire against him. If that was Katte's attitude, that would be consistent with sympathy for the abused boyfriend at very the end and also the "never do it again" Punctae.