Werner Schmidt: So in a short while after very soon to be F1 returns amidst reassurances, has a lengthy talk with Dad and is officially reconciled with him, though how deep that went is anyone's guess, the Elector dies. My guy becomes F3 at first, since he's not King yet but Elector. Now, let's talk money! And buildings! And cultural foundations! I'm simply incensed at the double standards everyone has. Take two of F1's contemporaries: Max Emmanuel of Bavaria and August the Strong. Both pump a lot of money into baroque palaces and parties. selenak can show you her pics of Nymphenburg which Max Emmanuel built in Munich, and you've seen Dresden, where August left his mark. Both Max Emmanuel and August also weren't content with being Princes Elector, they wanted to become Kings. Hell, Max Emmanuel wanted to be Emperor! That's how he ended up on the French side in the Spanish War of Succession and Eugene & Marlborough kicked his butt at Blenheim/Blindheim/Höchstedt! Which is in Bavaria, and Bavaria suffered for those armies marching through just half a century after the 30 Years War, which was hardly recovery time! As for August, he changed his religion to get his hands on Poland. That's how eager he was to all himself King! And then he pissed off Charles XII, which resulted in the Scouring of Saxony (Swedish variation). What I'm getting at: August and Max Emmanuel get called art loving powerful Baroque princes.My guy Friedrich, by contrast, gets bashed as a ridiculous money wasting prince making himself the laughing stock of Europe with his wanting to become a King. Yet are the baroque buildings from the F1 era any lesser than those in Bavaria and Saxony, huh? While Brandenburg never ever suffered from being scoured or marched through (until grandson's time anyway). Not for lack of war. F1 was participating in wars for 22 of the 25 years of his rule, which is way more than son and grandson put together. But he participated in other people's wars, ELSEWHERE, and got a crown out of it because the Emperor really needed those Prussian troops. To return to my point: Max Emmanuel, August and F1 were all big baroque spenders. Only Bavarians and Saxons suffered while this was going on, while Prussians profited, yet my guy...
Frank Göse: Excuse me. I also think he got understimated and that he needs to be compared to his contemporaries, not to his son and grandson, but we have to acknowledge that his subjects did suffer in the three W era, despite the lack of an invasion.
Werner Schmidt:. But we're not there yet! For the first 13 years of F1's rule, his PM was Danckelmann. As in, former shouty teacher, prodigy, austere proto Prussian. Since he started as an ordinary citizen, the nobility hated his guts. The Secret Council was jealous as hell, and lobbied against him. But what really did him in was one woman's hate. Yes, Figuelotte, I'm blaming this one on you! Welll, on you and F1's unresolved issues with a teacher he'd admired and feared and who made him translate "Fritz will always be an ass" into Latin.
Frank Göse: While I wouldn't deny Sophie Charlotte came to dislike Danckelmann intensely, I think her part in his downfall was exaggarated by later Hohenzollern historians. As was her political influence in general, as opposed to her cultural one. She also disliked Danckelmann's successor Wartenberg, and Wartenberg remained on top till the last two years of F1's life, and it was her son who did him in.
Werner Schmidt: You're far too easy on her. Let's state for the record she hated Danckelmann because he saw through her. Remember how we've said that primogeniture hadn't become the self evident princple in the German principalities yet and that the Elector near the end of his life was trying to get a secondogeniture thing going? Well, Hannover, newly coined electorate that it was, also had the problem of lots of sons. However, Sophie's husband Ernst August had no intention of letting his newly united realm be hacked into tiny principality pieces once he died. Which is why he changed the law so that his oldest, George Louis, future G1, would inherit it all. Now, this was not in Prussia's interest, since until then Hannover & Brandenburg had been in the same playing field, but an undivided with that intriguing British prospect on the horizon would be more powerful. So Danckelmann encouraged some Hannoverian councillors to make a move preventing primogeniture to become law in Hannover. However, Figuelotte learned about this and warned Mom and Dad what was coming, thereby proving she loved Hannover more. Since Dad had one of the councillors executed, which ended opposition to primogeniture becoming law in Hannover, she also had blood on her hands! And when Danckelmann basically called her a treacherous bitch, she dared to resent him for it!
Frank Göse: I dare say she also resented him for being in charge of FW's educational schedule for the first few years, especially once presented with the results, i.e. Tiny Terror FW.
Werner Schmidt: That's what she claimed in her letters to Mom, but I don't believe her. She was being hysterical and trying to justify her hate. Not very philosophical of this so-called "Philosopher Queen".
Frank Göse: My point stands: while she undoubtedly cheered when Danckelmann fell, she wasn't the primary mover, nor did she profit from it. The guy moving into that power vacuum was Wartenberg, not Sophie Charlotte.
Werner Schmidt: I'm also blaming her for this. If she'd just shown more political interest, F1, who adored her, would not have needed Wartenberg and listened to her instead. But no! Madame preferred having debates with Leipniz and getting on with her Athens-on-the-Spree program .
Frank Göse: Blaming her both for intervening in the political arena (Danckelmann) and not intervening (Wartenberg) as a way of explaining why she disliked both yet only one fell within her life time is a bit illogical.
Werner Schmidt: I also do the psychological thing which you don't and declare that the way Danckelmann fell, the arrest, the years locked up before he was released, the multiple accusations which were plainly ridiculous were not only the the work of his enemies but of F1's subconscious. Freud would have totally gone for the delayed oedipal father figure killing explanation there. Moving on to the three W's. They were scum.
Frank Göse: Beg to differ.
Werner Schmidt: They were! Exploiting my fave woobie because he needed affection and respect and sure as hell wasn't getting it from his wife.
Frank Göse: Incidentally, we both agree that while F1 loved Sophie Charlotte, Figuelotte after the first few years did not love him, only I see this not as coldness on her part but the result of both of them being very different. And growing up. Remember, she'd been only sixteen when she married him. She'd liked him, and he might even have been a romantic figure to her - the persecuted, grieving prince - , papering over the fact he was handicapped, not physically attractive to her, not as quick verbally, a devout Calvinist where she was more into philosophy, someone who rose early while she was a night owl, who loved ceremonies which bored her. In short, he was the EC to her Fritz, only the power differential was the reverse. So she took some tobacco to snuff while he had his coronation ceremony at Königsberg to make fun of all the earnest pomposity -
Werner Schmidt: The most meaningful achievement of his life to him! She hardly could have hurt him more!
Frank Göse: That's your speculation, and you don't provide any quote from him to prove he was hurt.
Werner Schmidt: I don't need it, I know his soul. I also completely believe that story about her making fun of his size and don't consider it apocryphal, unlike you. After all, we do have her calling him "my Aesop" in one of her few preserved letters, and given Aesop had a hunchback, that just shows how she was. Like her grandson, indeed. But let's get on to the scum. Wartenberg:. the worst of the worst. Typical evil favourite. The only good thing he ever did as PM was uniting the various parts of Berlin with each other and making it the Berlin it was in Fritz' time. Otherwise, he just took money and offices, unlike Danckelmann was careful enough to let himself be made Reichsgraf, which meant he was a peer of the HRE, not just Prussia, which meant that when he did fall, he couldn't end up locked up as well. He also promoted his buddies at his side, like awful Wittgenstein, who was already deeply in debt when Wartenberg hired him, and that scum Wartensleben the Katte Granddad.
Frank Göse: Wartensleben wasn't like the other two Ws. My guy FW's liking for him testifies to that! He only got bitched about initially because the local military noblemen were totally jealous that he got promoted to head of the army over their heads.
Werner Schmidt: I don't think so. Watch me tear Granddad Wartensleben a new one while describing him thus to my readers: Wartensleben reccommended himself through the "galant courtier's life as a condottieri he'd lived" (Koch). He'd fought for and against the French, against the Turks and for the Venetians and finally ended up as leader of the army of Saxe-Gotha. Such a flexible and amoral mind ata the head of the (Prussian) army was for Wartenberg the ideal replacement of a stubborn straight-talker like Barfus.
Frank Göse: As for Wartenberg himself: agreed that he was corrupt. But no more so than the top guys at any Baroque court. Can we agree that contrary to what the gossips claimed and what since got repeated by people through the ages, he did not pimp out his wife as a mistress to F1?
Werner Schmidt: Most def. F1 never slept with her, and no, he didn't take her as a titular mistress, either. That woman was scum, though. After Wartenberg died, she plied her trade in Brussels and died a whore. You know how she and Wartenberg met? She was the daughter of a customs inspector, which legend made an innkeeper. Then she married a royal valet who brought her to Berlin, where she became Wartenberg's mistress. Then Danckelmann made Wartenberg marry her, which was the TRUE reason why Wartenberg hated Danckelmann and jointed the rest of the council who wanted to tumble him.
Frank Göse: Not so. I say these are legends. Sure, the woman loved splendor and power, which as the Pm's wife she had, but might I point out Sophie received her in Hannover? Would Sophie have done that if she'd thought La Wartenberg had been her son-in-law's mistress and the rival of her late beloved daughter?
Werner Schmidt: Sophie also received her own husband's mistress and those of her son and grandson, so that's not exactly a good argument.
Frank Göse: Still, her overall positive description of the Countess paints a more differentiated picture.
Werner Schmidt: Still a female Don Juan, though. Though she said that while her conquests were many, the King, much as she'd liked to, never was among them.
Frank Göse: Let's go back to the part where Figuelotte dies young, only in her early 30s, son FW married SD, and then F1 marries for the third time to secure the succession.
Werner Schmidt: we both agree this last marriage was a tragedy. The poor girl was evidently unstable from the get go. Also a fanatic Lutheran. She told F1 he would go to hell because only Lutherans, not Calvinists, went to heaven. And after the White Woman of the Hohenzollern incident, well, that was that. She died insane in Mecklenburg.
Frank Göse: RIP. Let's say something of grandson's two more famous accusations, to wit, that F1 while pumping money into courtly splendour and art didn't give any to his subjects suffering from the plague.
Werner Schmidt: Total slander and untrue. He provided 100 000 Taler, which are 20 Million Deutsche Marks in modern currency (that I don't use Euros tells you my book can't have been published for the first time in 2003), for the plague victims' families and rebuilding of Prussia. Grandson's claim that F1 oppressed the poor to feed the rich is also - well, rich. Look, F2, F1 had his luxury goods made in Brandenburg if at all possible, and thus encouraged the local economy, which took a hit at first when FW took over and immediately cut off all court orders. Also, someone who built his palaces with Silesian marble and brought three wars on Prussia is not in a position to talk about taking care of the poor, F2!
Frank Göse: With you except that we have to grant that the administration was in a terrible state when Wartenberg was toppled and FW needed a lot of work to make up for that. Also, he solved the problem of no more work for artisans, craftsmen, tailors, bakeries etc. by increasing the need for army supplies as we all now.
Werner Schmnidt: Oh, and as for grandson F2 quipping that if only the priests had offered F1 more ceremonies, F1 wouldn't have remained a Calvinist but converted, that just shows you how he sacrificed truth for a quip, truly his grandmother's grandson in this. a) F1 would never have converted. The Pope, having succeeded in making August the Strong a Catholic as the prize for making him a king, did try, holding out the lure of a papal coronation, and F1 said never. He was sincere in his faith.
Frank Göse: So he was. Also, b) you can't beat the Catholics for ceremony, especially for coronations, just ask MT or Joseph. So what's this "if the priests had offered more ceremonies"? F1 knew all about those ceremonies and said no anyway. Grandson was just incapable of granting him a single virtue, even that of sincere religion.
Werner Schmidt: Should we say something about F1's relationship with FW? You do it, because I'm oddly silent on the subject. While you're going on to become an FW specialist.
Frank Göse: Err. Well. I don't say much. Because we don't have much material to judge it on. No famous arguments, unlike in any other generation of Hohenzollern. F1 left the arguing with teachers and the instructing of same to Sophie Charlotte. He worried about his son and was proud of him, but he was a distant Dad, though no more so than usual for a king and a prince. As FW got older, it became ever more blatant they did not enjoy the same things, and FW was drawn to people like Old Young Dessaur who could provide him with all the manly military stuff his father lacked, but there were no insults said about the father from the son or from the father about the sun. Basically, Crown Prince FW was at Wusterhausen living the country life most of the time. I do think he was more emotionally invested in his mother, for all that he believed in the patriarchy.
Werner Schmidt: I'm ending my book by saying that this lonely man who never found true love again after his first wife died, and who was ridiculed as a cripple all his life - "Humpback Fritz", the people called him - still managed to create a kingdom and solidify it at an age where Louis the supreme honcho of France just kept ruining his with his endless wars, August and Max Emmanuel, see above, and the Medici, let's not even go there. Long live Wobbie F1!
Once Upon A Time in Brandenburg: The Lonely King
Frank Göse: Excuse me. I also think he got understimated and that he needs to be compared to his contemporaries, not to his son and grandson, but we have to acknowledge that his subjects did suffer in the three W era, despite the lack of an invasion.
Werner Schmidt:. But we're not there yet! For the first 13 years of F1's rule, his PM was Danckelmann. As in, former shouty teacher, prodigy, austere proto Prussian. Since he started as an ordinary citizen, the nobility hated his guts. The Secret Council was jealous as hell, and lobbied against him. But what really did him in was one woman's hate. Yes, Figuelotte, I'm blaming this one on you! Welll, on you and F1's unresolved issues with a teacher he'd admired and feared and who made him translate "Fritz will always be an ass" into Latin.
Frank Göse: While I wouldn't deny Sophie Charlotte came to dislike Danckelmann intensely, I think her part in his downfall was exaggarated by later Hohenzollern historians. As was her political influence in general, as opposed to her cultural one. She also disliked Danckelmann's successor Wartenberg, and Wartenberg remained on top till the last two years of F1's life, and it was her son who did him in.
Werner Schmidt: You're far too easy on her. Let's state for the record she hated Danckelmann because he saw through her. Remember how we've said that primogeniture hadn't become the self evident princple in the German principalities yet and that the Elector near the end of his life was trying to get a secondogeniture thing going? Well, Hannover, newly coined electorate that it was, also had the problem of lots of sons. However, Sophie's husband Ernst August had no intention of letting his newly united realm be hacked into tiny principality pieces once he died. Which is why he changed the law so that his oldest, George Louis, future G1, would inherit it all. Now, this was not in Prussia's interest, since until then Hannover & Brandenburg had been in the same playing field, but an undivided with that intriguing British prospect on the horizon would be more powerful. So Danckelmann encouraged some Hannoverian councillors to make a move preventing primogeniture to become law in Hannover. However, Figuelotte learned about this and warned Mom and Dad what was coming, thereby proving she loved Hannover more. Since Dad had one of the councillors executed, which ended opposition to primogeniture becoming law in Hannover, she also had blood on her hands! And when Danckelmann basically called her a treacherous bitch, she dared to resent him for it!
Frank Göse: I dare say she also resented him for being in charge of FW's educational schedule for the first few years, especially once presented with the results, i.e. Tiny Terror FW.
Werner Schmidt: That's what she claimed in her letters to Mom, but I don't believe her. She was being hysterical and trying to justify her hate. Not very philosophical of this so-called "Philosopher Queen".
Frank Göse: My point stands: while she undoubtedly cheered when Danckelmann fell, she wasn't the primary mover, nor did she profit from it. The guy moving into that power vacuum was Wartenberg, not Sophie Charlotte.
Werner Schmidt: I'm also blaming her for this. If she'd just shown more political interest, F1, who adored her, would not have needed Wartenberg and listened to her instead. But no! Madame preferred having debates with Leipniz and getting on with her Athens-on-the-Spree program .
Frank Göse: Blaming her both for intervening in the political arena (Danckelmann) and not intervening (Wartenberg) as a way of explaining why she disliked both yet only one fell within her life time is a bit illogical.
Werner Schmidt: I also do the psychological thing which you don't and declare that the way Danckelmann fell, the arrest, the years locked up before he was released, the multiple accusations which were plainly ridiculous were not only the the work of his enemies but of F1's subconscious. Freud would have totally gone for the delayed oedipal father figure killing explanation there. Moving on to the three W's. They were scum.
Frank Göse: Beg to differ.
Werner Schmidt: They were! Exploiting my fave woobie because he needed affection and respect and sure as hell wasn't getting it from his wife.
Frank Göse: Incidentally, we both agree that while F1 loved Sophie Charlotte, Figuelotte after the first few years did not love him, only I see this not as coldness on her part but the result of both of them being very different. And growing up. Remember, she'd been only sixteen when she married him. She'd liked him, and he might even have been a romantic figure to her - the persecuted, grieving prince - , papering over the fact he was handicapped, not physically attractive to her, not as quick verbally, a devout Calvinist where she was more into philosophy, someone who rose early while she was a night owl, who loved ceremonies which bored her. In short, he was the EC to her Fritz, only the power differential was the reverse. So she took some tobacco to snuff while he had his coronation ceremony at Königsberg to make fun of all the earnest pomposity -
Werner Schmidt: The most meaningful achievement of his life to him! She hardly could have hurt him more!
Frank Göse: That's your speculation, and you don't provide any quote from him to prove he was hurt.
Werner Schmidt: I don't need it, I know his soul. I also completely believe that story about her making fun of his size and don't consider it apocryphal, unlike you. After all, we do have her calling him "my Aesop" in one of her few preserved letters, and given Aesop had a hunchback, that just shows how she was. Like her grandson, indeed. But let's get on to the scum. Wartenberg:. the worst of the worst. Typical evil favourite. The only good thing he ever did as PM was uniting the various parts of Berlin with each other and making it the Berlin it was in Fritz' time. Otherwise, he just took money and offices, unlike Danckelmann was careful enough to let himself be made Reichsgraf, which meant he was a peer of the HRE, not just Prussia, which meant that when he did fall, he couldn't end up locked up as well. He also promoted his buddies at his side, like awful Wittgenstein, who was already deeply in debt when Wartenberg hired him, and that scum Wartensleben the Katte Granddad.
Frank Göse: Wartensleben wasn't like the other two Ws. My guy FW's liking for him testifies to that! He only got bitched about initially because the local military noblemen were totally jealous that he got promoted to head of the army over their heads.
Werner Schmidt: I don't think so. Watch me tear Granddad Wartensleben a new one while describing him thus to my readers: Wartensleben reccommended himself through the "galant courtier's life as a condottieri he'd lived" (Koch). He'd fought for and against the French, against the Turks and for the Venetians and finally ended up as leader of the army of Saxe-Gotha. Such a flexible and amoral mind ata the head of the (Prussian) army was for Wartenberg the ideal replacement of a stubborn straight-talker like Barfus.
Frank Göse: As for Wartenberg himself: agreed that he was corrupt. But no more so than the top guys at any Baroque court. Can we agree that contrary to what the gossips claimed and what since got repeated by people through the ages, he did not pimp out his wife as a mistress to F1?
Werner Schmidt: Most def. F1 never slept with her, and no, he didn't take her as a titular mistress, either. That woman was scum, though. After Wartenberg died, she plied her trade in Brussels and died a whore. You know how she and Wartenberg met? She was the daughter of a customs inspector, which legend made an innkeeper. Then she married a royal valet who brought her to Berlin, where she became Wartenberg's mistress. Then Danckelmann made Wartenberg marry her, which was the TRUE reason why Wartenberg hated Danckelmann and jointed the rest of the council who wanted to tumble him.
Frank Göse: Not so. I say these are legends. Sure, the woman loved splendor and power, which as the Pm's wife she had, but might I point out Sophie received her in Hannover? Would Sophie have done that if she'd thought La Wartenberg had been her son-in-law's mistress and the rival of her late beloved daughter?
Werner Schmidt: Sophie also received her own husband's mistress and those of her son and grandson, so that's not exactly a good argument.
Frank Göse: Still, her overall positive description of the Countess paints a more differentiated picture.
Werner Schmidt: Still a female Don Juan, though. Though she said that while her conquests were many, the King, much as she'd liked to, never was among them.
Frank Göse: Let's go back to the part where Figuelotte dies young, only in her early 30s, son FW married SD, and then F1 marries for the third time to secure the succession.
Werner Schmidt: we both agree this last marriage was a tragedy. The poor girl was evidently unstable from the get go. Also a fanatic Lutheran. She told F1 he would go to hell because only Lutherans, not Calvinists, went to heaven. And after the White Woman of the Hohenzollern incident, well, that was that. She died insane in Mecklenburg.
Frank Göse: RIP. Let's say something of grandson's two more famous accusations, to wit, that F1 while pumping money into courtly splendour and art didn't give any to his subjects suffering from the plague.
Werner Schmidt: Total slander and untrue. He provided 100 000 Taler, which are 20 Million Deutsche Marks in modern currency (that I don't use Euros tells you my book can't have been published for the first time in 2003), for the plague victims' families and rebuilding of Prussia. Grandson's claim that F1 oppressed the poor to feed the rich is also - well, rich. Look, F2, F1 had his luxury goods made in Brandenburg if at all possible, and thus encouraged the local economy, which took a hit at first when FW took over and immediately cut off all court orders. Also, someone who built his palaces with Silesian marble and brought three wars on Prussia is not in a position to talk about taking care of the poor, F2!
Frank Göse: With you except that we have to grant that the administration was in a terrible state when Wartenberg was toppled and FW needed a lot of work to make up for that. Also, he solved the problem of no more work for artisans, craftsmen, tailors, bakeries etc. by increasing the need for army supplies as we all now.
Werner Schmnidt: Oh, and as for grandson F2 quipping that if only the priests had offered F1 more ceremonies, F1 wouldn't have remained a Calvinist but converted, that just shows you how he sacrificed truth for a quip, truly his grandmother's grandson in this. a) F1 would never have converted. The Pope, having succeeded in making August the Strong a Catholic as the prize for making him a king, did try, holding out the lure of a papal coronation, and F1 said never. He was sincere in his faith.
Frank Göse: So he was. Also, b) you can't beat the Catholics for ceremony, especially for coronations, just ask MT or Joseph. So what's this "if the priests had offered more ceremonies"? F1 knew all about those ceremonies and said no anyway. Grandson was just incapable of granting him a single virtue, even that of sincere religion.
Werner Schmidt: Should we say something about F1's relationship with FW? You do it, because I'm oddly silent on the subject. While you're going on to become an FW specialist.
Frank Göse: Err. Well. I don't say much. Because we don't have much material to judge it on. No famous arguments, unlike in any other generation of Hohenzollern. F1 left the arguing with teachers and the instructing of same to Sophie Charlotte. He worried about his son and was proud of him, but he was a distant Dad, though no more so than usual for a king and a prince. As FW got older, it became ever more blatant they did not enjoy the same things, and FW was drawn to people like
OldYoung Dessaur who could provide him with all the manly military stuff his father lacked, but there were no insults said about the father from the son or from the father about the sun. Basically, Crown Prince FW was at Wusterhausen living the country life most of the time. I do think he was more emotionally invested in his mother, for all that he believed in the patriarchy.Werner Schmidt: I'm ending my book by saying that this lonely man who never found true love again after his first wife died, and who was ridiculed as a cripple all his life - "Humpback Fritz", the people called him - still managed to create a kingdom and solidify it at an age where Louis the supreme honcho of France just kept ruining his with his endless wars, August and Max Emmanuel, see above, and the Medici, let's not even go there. Long live Wobbie F1!