The SD the older/Königsmarck love letters book turned out to be only a registry of their love letters, published by Schnath in 1952, at which time he doesn't show double standards about male and female adultery anymore in his introduction. He provides a short summary of what the letter in question is about for each letter, and whether or not the letter in question has been mentioned or printed in one of the earlier publications. Not without smugness, he notes that this registry is the most complete ever, especially since the edition by Wilkins solely features the letters archived at Lund and completely ignores the letters Ulrike stole and sent Fritz which were kept at Sanssouci within his life time and then at the Prussian State archive. Schnath says that since this was already a well known fact when Wilkins published, he can't explain why Wilkins didn't make the additional trip to read them in Germany.
The letters themselves prove that Königsmarck and poor SD of Celle, whatever other risks they took, were way more careful in their coding than the Imperial secret service two generations later with such code names like "Olympia", "Junior" and "Le Diable". Königsmarck/SD use about 50 code names, thirty of which have only been decyphred as of 1952, and sometimes several code names for the same person. They also used secret ink, and numbers for additional secrecy. In his letter summaries, Schnath provides mostly the clear names or numbers with footnotes if he has guesses that aren't yet proven, and otherwise the numbers or code names. Future G1 is mostly "Don Diego", SD the older herself "Leonissa" but also "Isabella" and some other names taken from popular novels at the time.
Since summaries of love letters tend to be pretty dull ("K swears eternal love" "Pr. is sad about getting no letters the last two days" etc.), except if such details are mentioned as the bit that also made it into Horowski's book, Königsmarck amusing little 6 years old SD and the future Mrs. Grumbkow (same age) by building card houses for them, I mostly leafed through them. Meanwhile, I found out there's a 1946 British movie - produced by the Ealing Studios - about the affair, "Sarabande for Dead Lovers" (great title!), starring Stewart Granger as Königsmarck and Joan Greenwood as Sophia Dorotha of Celle. (Co-starring Flora Robson as Countess Platen, about whom more in a moment, and a young Christopher Lee - THAT Christopher Lee - in a cameo as Anton Ulrich of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel.) The movie was filmed mostly at Blenheim Palace (of Marlborough fame, remember), which makes sense considering that in 1946 Hannover was in ruins due to all the bombing and it would take a while to rebuild. This movie in turn is based on a 1935 novel of the same name by Australian writer Helen Simpson, which is online in its enterity courtesy of Gutenberg Australia. It turned out to be a solid historical novel. You can nitpick about some of the choices (for example, no argument that future G1 was a brute, but he actually wasn't the kind of brute who doesn't care how many of his soldiers he gets killed; on the contrary, he had during his service in the Imperial wars against Turkey and the Palatine succession war gained the reputation of a sensible, cautious but not too cautious commander, and at one point when his superior wanted to punish for a bad battle by decimation (literally - every tenth man was supposed to get shot) had outright refused to do so. (He also wasn't a baroque party boy but while Prince Elector of Hanover and not yet English King on the contrary famous for keeping an eye on the money and avoiding the money consuming trips to Italy for debauchery both his uncle and his father had made an annual event; Schnath, who doesn't like him and calls him "cold and unsympathetic" also says he was a very able administrator. ("A jerk, but not that kind of a jerk" sums up G1 well in general.) Also, while Sophie undoubtedly once the English succession became a plausible option inwardly was rooting for that and was thrilled when it became a certainty, neither her memoirs nor her letters gave me the impression she saw England and the English as superior, wiser beings. The novel also completely misses out her sense of humor and the warmth she was capable of, though given that she mostly interacts with people she doesn't like, including her daughter-in-law, fair enough.
But such nitpicks don't change the fact the novel does a good job conjuring up the era and provides pretty layered characters. For a plot in theory sounds like a precipe for an historical AU of the pop culture depiction of Princess Diana (young girl marries into cold dysfunctional royal family where no one likes or supports her, her husband already has a mistress he loves anyway, and when she takes a lover, that's treated completely differently), only more so, it amazingly spends most of its narrative exploration not on the two tragic lovers - though they are treated with great sympathy - but on two of the antagonists/villains, by which I don't mean future G1, who only shows up briefly to make it clear what a jerk he is. No, I mean Sophie and the Countess Platen. The Countess, long time mistress of Sophie's husband Ernst August, is basically the main villain of the novel. In this version, Königsmarck was her lover first, and she made the mistake of actually falling in love with him just when he was falling in love with SDC, to whom he then became faithful. It's a woman scorned plot, but one written from her pov. (Re: the film version, Stewart Granger said he wanted Marlene Dietrich for the part and wasn't content with Flora Robson, because Flora Robson, while a great actress, had never been beautiful, "and I had to be cruel to her, and I find it hard to be cruel to a woman who has never been beautiful". Okay, Stewart.) The historical basis for this are rumors about a previous Countess/Königsmarck affair, but they weren't proven; her main beef with him according to wiki seems to have been that he refused to marry her daughter, whereupon she outed him and SCDC to future G1. Said daughter doesn't show up in the novel at all, but she's the later Gräfin Kielsmannsegg and Lady Darlington whom G1 took with him to Britain along with his mistress, Katte's aunt Melusine von Schulenburg, and whom the Brits took to be his mistress as well.
Anyway, the Countess in the book is presented as smart and able - the only smarter character is Sophie - , and falling in love with Königsmarck is the first uncalculated thing she does in her life, which (from her pov) promptly backfires on her as he ditches her for the next pretty (and socially higher) thing. And not only does she out him, she actually organizes his murder herself. (When reading, I wondered whether this was the author's wway of blaming the ancestors of the current Royal family for it, but then again, G1 is presented as getting his soldiers killed for the heck of it and shooting a huntsman as a joke, so probably not.)
Less of a villain but definitely an antagonist is the novel's version of Sophie, who in addition of having the historical Sophie's objection to SDC and what she represents (reminder: SDC's Dad Georg Wilhelm was the Hannover who originally was supposed to marry Sophie, got syphilis, thought this was it and suggested Sophie marry his younger brother Ernst August instead, promising he would never, ever marry and procreate if she did and gave her that in writing, only for him to then fall in love with his mistress Eleonore d'Olbreuse, morganatically marry her and legitimize their daughter SDC) is written in general as a cold (but not evil) intellectual, loving only her books, seeing her son for the jerk he is but seeing the family's ascension to the English throne as the main goal which no one must endanger. It's not that she hates on young SDC once the marriage is done, she's just not sympathetic. (Typical scene: SDC, wanting to bond with her mother-in-law, vents about the fact that they're both openly cheated on by their respective husbands with very prominent mistresses. Sophie's response is a cool "Oh, grow up".) She gets probably the most scenes in the novel, including the last scene, and there is the vibe that while the author feels sorry for the two young lovers, these two ladies are the characters who actually interest her, and not so coincidentally the last scene is between them. (Sophie signals to the Countess she knows what Platen did and why, and banishes her from Hannover, no ifs, no buts.)
As for the titular lovers, SDC is a young naive who because her parents had married for love has no idea what she's getting into and for whom the love affair is the only escape of a terrible situation, and Königsmarck is at first something of a dashing opportunist (Platen is still an attractive woman, but his motivation for the affair is definitely mercenary) who however then truly loves SDC, and dies for it. Neither of them has much common sense or smarts. I do regret that other than one remark, there is no mention of his sister, Aurora von Königsmarck, who was August the Strong's first maitresse en titre (and the ancestress of French writer George Sand through her son Maurice de Saxe), since she's the one who wanted to find out what happened to him and used her royal lover's influence to investigate, thus ensuring the mysterious disappearance couldn't just be covered over and forgotten. But branching out to include her would have gone against the atmosphere of increasing claustrophobia in Hannover, so I guess I understand why Simpson didn't.
Not having seen the movie, I don't know how close or different to the novel it is, but going by the opening scene, they've changed the narrative emphasis, if it's all in first person as a letter written by dying SDC to future G2 in order to explain to him about her life.
The letters themselves prove that Königsmarck and poor SD of Celle, whatever other risks they took, were way more careful in their coding than the Imperial secret service two generations later with such code names like "Olympia", "Junior" and "Le Diable". Königsmarck/SD use about 50 code names, thirty of which have only been decyphred as of 1952, and sometimes several code names for the same person. They also used secret ink, and numbers for additional secrecy.
Good for them! Bad for us, but good for them. Sorry it still didn't work out. :/
Since summaries of love letters tend to be pretty dull ("K swears eternal love" "Pr. is sad about getting no letters the last two days" etc.), except if such details are mentioned as the bit that also made it into Horowski's book, Königsmarck amusing little 6 years old SD and the future Mrs. Grumbkow (same age) by building card houses for them, I mostly leafed through them.
Yeah, that makes sense. Too bad, but glad it led you to the novel. The review was great as your reviews always are, thank you!
at one point when his superior wanted to punish for a bad battle by decimation (literally - every tenth man was supposed to get shot) had outright refused to do so.
Wow! I mean mostly about the decimation, but good for G1, in this case at least.
For a plot in theory sounds like a precipe for an historical AU of the pop culture depiction of Princess Diana (young girl marries into cold dysfunctional royal family where no one likes or supports her, her husband already has a mistress he loves anyway, and when she takes a lover, that's treated completely differently)
Heh, I wouldn't have made the Princess Diana connection necessarily, but it really is reminiscent, isn't it!
and there is the vibe that while the author feels sorry for the two young lovers, these two ladies are the characters who actually interest her, and not so coincidentally the last scene is between them. (Sophie signals to the Countess she knows what Platen did and why, and banishes her from Hannover, no ifs, no buts.)
Sophie and Countess Platen actually sound really fascinating in this novel. I really like that they're portrayed as interesting and not one-dimensional, and I agree with Simpson that they sound more interesting than the lovers :P
(Typical scene: SDC, wanting to bond with her mother-in-law, vents about the fact that they're both openly cheated on by their respective husbands with very prominent mistresses. Sophie's response is a cool "Oh, grow up".)
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timeasmymeasure
Sarabande for dead lovers
Date: 2021-06-12 10:13 am (UTC)The letters themselves prove that Königsmarck and poor SD of Celle, whatever other risks they took, were way more careful in their coding than the Imperial secret service two generations later with such code names like "Olympia", "Junior" and "Le Diable". Königsmarck/SD use about 50 code names, thirty of which have only been decyphred as of 1952, and sometimes several code names for the same person. They also used secret ink, and numbers for additional secrecy. In his letter summaries, Schnath provides mostly the clear names or numbers with footnotes if he has guesses that aren't yet proven, and otherwise the numbers or code names. Future G1 is mostly "Don Diego", SD the older herself "Leonissa" but also "Isabella" and some other names taken from popular novels at the time.
Since summaries of love letters tend to be pretty dull ("K swears eternal love" "Pr. is sad about getting no letters the last two days" etc.), except if such details are mentioned as the bit that also made it into Horowski's book, Königsmarck amusing little 6 years old SD and the future Mrs. Grumbkow (same age) by building card houses for them, I mostly leafed through them. Meanwhile, I found out there's a 1946 British movie - produced by the Ealing Studios - about the affair, "Sarabande for Dead Lovers" (great title!), starring Stewart Granger as Königsmarck and Joan Greenwood as Sophia Dorotha of Celle. (Co-starring Flora Robson as Countess Platen, about whom more in a moment, and a young Christopher Lee - THAT Christopher Lee - in a cameo as Anton Ulrich of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel.) The movie was filmed mostly at Blenheim Palace (of Marlborough fame, remember), which makes sense considering that in 1946 Hannover was in ruins due to all the bombing and it would take a while to rebuild. This movie in turn is based on a 1935 novel of the same name by Australian writer Helen Simpson, which is online in its enterity courtesy of Gutenberg Australia. It turned out to be a solid historical novel. You can nitpick about some of the choices (for example, no argument that future G1 was a brute, but he actually wasn't the kind of brute who doesn't care how many of his soldiers he gets killed; on the contrary, he had during his service in the Imperial wars against Turkey and the Palatine succession war gained the reputation of a sensible, cautious but not too cautious commander, and at one point when his superior wanted to punish for a bad battle by decimation (literally - every tenth man was supposed to get shot) had outright refused to do so. (He also wasn't a baroque party boy but while Prince Elector of Hanover and not yet English King on the contrary famous for keeping an eye on the money and avoiding the money consuming trips to Italy for debauchery both his uncle and his father had made an annual event; Schnath, who doesn't like him and calls him "cold and unsympathetic" also says he was a very able administrator. ("A jerk, but not that kind of a jerk" sums up G1 well in general.) Also, while Sophie undoubtedly once the English succession became a plausible option inwardly was rooting for that and was thrilled when it became a certainty, neither her memoirs nor her letters gave me the impression she saw England and the English as superior, wiser beings. The novel also completely misses out her sense of humor and the warmth she was capable of, though given that she mostly interacts with people she doesn't like, including her daughter-in-law, fair enough.
But such nitpicks don't change the fact the novel does a good job conjuring up the era and provides pretty layered characters. For a plot in theory sounds like a precipe for an historical AU of the pop culture depiction of Princess Diana (young girl marries into cold dysfunctional royal family where no one likes or supports her, her husband already has a mistress he loves anyway, and when she takes a lover, that's treated completely differently), only more so, it amazingly spends most of its narrative exploration not on the two tragic lovers - though they are treated with great sympathy - but on two of the antagonists/villains, by which I don't mean future G1, who only shows up briefly to make it clear what a jerk he is. No, I mean Sophie and the Countess Platen. The Countess, long time mistress of Sophie's husband Ernst August, is basically the main villain of the novel. In this version, Königsmarck was her lover first, and she made the mistake of actually falling in love with him just when he was falling in love with SDC, to whom he then became faithful. It's a woman scorned plot, but one written from her pov. (Re: the film version, Stewart Granger said he wanted Marlene Dietrich for the part and wasn't content with Flora Robson, because Flora Robson, while a great actress, had never been beautiful, "and I had to be cruel to her, and I find it hard to be cruel to a woman who has never been beautiful". Okay, Stewart.) The historical basis for this are rumors about a previous Countess/Königsmarck affair, but they weren't proven; her main beef with him according to wiki seems to have been that he refused to marry her daughter, whereupon she outed him and SCDC to future G1. Said daughter doesn't show up in the novel at all, but she's the later Gräfin Kielsmannsegg and Lady Darlington whom G1 took with him to Britain along with his mistress, Katte's aunt Melusine von Schulenburg, and whom the Brits took to be his mistress as well.
Anyway, the Countess in the book is presented as smart and able - the only smarter character is Sophie - , and falling in love with Königsmarck is the first uncalculated thing she does in her life, which (from her pov) promptly backfires on her as he ditches her for the next pretty (and socially higher) thing. And not only does she out him, she actually organizes his murder herself. (When reading, I wondered whether this was the author's wway of blaming the ancestors of the current Royal family for it, but then again, G1 is presented as getting his soldiers killed for the heck of it and shooting a huntsman as a joke, so probably not.)
Less of a villain but definitely an antagonist is the novel's version of Sophie, who in addition of having the historical Sophie's objection to SDC and what she represents (reminder: SDC's Dad Georg Wilhelm was the Hannover who originally was supposed to marry Sophie, got syphilis, thought this was it and suggested Sophie marry his younger brother Ernst August instead, promising he would never, ever marry and procreate if she did and gave her that in writing, only for him to then fall in love with his mistress Eleonore d'Olbreuse, morganatically marry her and legitimize their daughter SDC) is written in general as a cold (but not evil) intellectual, loving only her books, seeing her son for the jerk he is but seeing the family's ascension to the English throne as the main goal which no one must endanger. It's not that she hates on young SDC once the marriage is done, she's just not sympathetic. (Typical scene: SDC, wanting to bond with her mother-in-law, vents about the fact that they're both openly cheated on by their respective husbands with very prominent mistresses. Sophie's response is a cool "Oh, grow up".) She gets probably the most scenes in the novel, including the last scene, and there is the vibe that while the author feels sorry for the two young lovers, these two ladies are the characters who actually interest her, and not so coincidentally the last scene is between them. (Sophie signals to the Countess she knows what Platen did and why, and banishes her from Hannover, no ifs, no buts.)
As for the titular lovers, SDC is a young naive who because her parents had married for love has no idea what she's getting into and for whom the love affair is the only escape of a terrible situation, and Königsmarck is at first something of a dashing opportunist (Platen is still an attractive woman, but his motivation for the affair is definitely mercenary) who however then truly loves SDC, and dies for it. Neither of them has much common sense or smarts. I do regret that other than one remark, there is no mention of his sister, Aurora von Königsmarck, who was August the Strong's first maitresse en titre (and the ancestress of French writer George Sand through her son Maurice de Saxe), since she's the one who wanted to find out what happened to him and used her royal lover's influence to investigate, thus ensuring the mysterious disappearance couldn't just be covered over and forgotten. But branching out to include her would have gone against the atmosphere of increasing claustrophobia in Hannover, so I guess I understand why Simpson didn't.
Not having seen the movie, I don't know how close or different to the novel it is, but going by the opening scene, they've changed the narrative emphasis, if it's all in first person as a letter written by dying SDC to future G2 in order to explain to him about her life.
Re: Sarabande for dead lovers
Date: 2021-06-12 04:36 pm (UTC)Good for them! Bad for us, but good for them. Sorry it still didn't work out. :/
Since summaries of love letters tend to be pretty dull ("K swears eternal love" "Pr. is sad about getting no letters the last two days" etc.), except if such details are mentioned as the bit that also made it into Horowski's book, Königsmarck amusing little 6 years old SD and the future Mrs. Grumbkow (same age) by building card houses for them, I mostly leafed through them.
Yeah, that makes sense. Too bad, but glad it led you to the novel. The review was great as your reviews always are, thank you!
Re: Sarabande for dead lovers
Date: 2021-06-18 05:04 am (UTC)Wow! I mean mostly about the decimation, but good for G1, in this case at least.
For a plot in theory sounds like a precipe for an historical AU of the pop culture depiction of Princess Diana (young girl marries into cold dysfunctional royal family where no one likes or supports her, her husband already has a mistress he loves anyway, and when she takes a lover, that's treated completely differently)
Heh, I wouldn't have made the Princess Diana connection necessarily, but it really is reminiscent, isn't it!
and there is the vibe that while the author feels sorry for the two young lovers, these two ladies are the characters who actually interest her, and not so coincidentally the last scene is between them. (Sophie signals to the Countess she knows what Platen did and why, and banishes her from Hannover, no ifs, no buts.)
Sophie and Countess Platen actually sound really fascinating in this novel. I really like that they're portrayed as interesting and not one-dimensional, and I agree with Simpson that they sound more interesting than the lovers :P
(Typical scene: SDC, wanting to bond with her mother-in-law, vents about the fact that they're both openly cheated on by their respective husbands with very prominent mistresses. Sophie's response is a cool "Oh, grow up".)
hee!