Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 30
Sep. 8th, 2021 09:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnIn which, despite the title, I would like to be told about the English Revolution, which is yet another casualty of my extremely poor history education :P :)
Also, this is probably the place to say that RMSE opened with three Fritz-fics, all of which I think are readable with minimum canon knowledge:
The Boy Who Lived - if you knew about the doomed escape-from-Prussia-that-didn't happen and tragic death of Fritz's boyfriend Hans Hermann von Katte, you may not have known about Peter Keith, the third young man who conspired to escape Prussia -- and the only one who actually did. This is his story. I think readable without canon knowledge except what I just said here.
Challenge Yourself to Relax - My gift, I posted about this before! Corporate AU with my problematic fave, Fritz' brother Heinrich, who's still Fritz's l'autre moi-meme even in corporate AU. Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with the corporate world and the dysfunctions thereof.
The Rise and Fall of the RendezvousWithFame Exchange - Fandom AU with BNF fanfic writer Voltaire, exchange mod Fritz, and the inevitable meltdown. (I wrote this one and am quite proud of the terrible physics-adjacent pun contained within.) Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with fandom and the dysfunctions thereof :P
Also, this is probably the place to say that RMSE opened with three Fritz-fics, all of which I think are readable with minimum canon knowledge:
The Boy Who Lived - if you knew about the doomed escape-from-Prussia-that-didn't happen and tragic death of Fritz's boyfriend Hans Hermann von Katte, you may not have known about Peter Keith, the third young man who conspired to escape Prussia -- and the only one who actually did. This is his story. I think readable without canon knowledge except what I just said here.
Challenge Yourself to Relax - My gift, I posted about this before! Corporate AU with my problematic fave, Fritz' brother Heinrich, who's still Fritz's l'autre moi-meme even in corporate AU. Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with the corporate world and the dysfunctions thereof.
The Rise and Fall of the RendezvousWithFame Exchange - Fandom AU with BNF fanfic writer Voltaire, exchange mod Fritz, and the inevitable meltdown. (I wrote this one and am quite proud of the terrible physics-adjacent pun contained within.) Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with fandom and the dysfunctions thereof :P
Re: Goldstone is wrong, chapters 2 and 3
Date: 2021-09-26 07:08 pm (UTC)Earliest I know of is April 1732, so exactly when he left Küstrin. I'm not a hundred percent sure that it was the first one, but since Seckendorff's letter includes a detailed "this is how the money delivery is going to happen and also, this is how you should behave if you don't want to arouse suspicion" instruction, I'd say it's very likely. (Given that one of the instructions was to destroy the letter, Fritz clearly followed them diligently.)
"Farewell friends, I am better mounted than you are!"
Discussed. :P
At unexpected length. :P
Anyone wondering where Adolf Hitler came up with the notion of a German super-race need look no further [than FW trying to breed tall women to his Tall Guys].
What the ... WHAT??? Man. I can't even simply call that shoddy reasoning anymore.
(But also, I didn't know that about the Tall Women. Was that an actual thing or just a stray thought?)
Re: Goldstone is wrong, chapters 2 and 3
Date: 2021-09-26 09:38 pm (UTC)Aha, thank you!
(Given that one of the instructions was to destroy the letter, Fritz clearly followed them diligently.)
Ahahaha, oh, Fritz. Always the risk taker.
Discussed. :P
At unexpected length. :P
Oh, I would say the length was completely expected given the topic. You come into MY HOUSE, Goldstone, and talk unjustified shit about MY Fritz... :PP (I greatly appreciate your assistance in providing me with ammunition, felis. :))
What the ... WHAT??? Man. I can't even simply call that shoddy reasoning anymore.
Yeah, I don't even know what to do with that.
(But also, I didn't know that about the Tall Women. Was that an actual thing or just a stray thought?)
I've been running into mentions of this over and over again for twenty years (even incorporated it into unwritten fic), but never in a source that provided reliable evidence.
Wikipedia says:
Frederick tried to pair these men with tall women, in order to breed giants. In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin mentions this attempt as the only case of intentional human interbreeding: "Nor have certain male and female individuals been intentionally picked out and matched, except in the well-known case of the Prussian grenadiers; and in this case man obeyed, as might have been expected, the law of methodical selection; for it is asserted that many tall men were reared in the villages inhabited by the grenadiers with their tall wives."
I think I speak on behalf of
Re: Goldstone is wrong, chapters 2 and 3
Date: 2021-09-27 05:16 am (UTC)Well, fair, but I don't think any of us were expecting Maupertuis to show up as the source of that (rather telephone-game-twisted by the time it got to Goldstone) particular unjustified comment!
What the ... WHAT??? Man. I can't even simply call that shoddy reasoning anymore.
Yeah, I don't even know what to do with that.
Yeah, I saw that, was ??!?, and didn't even mention it in my comment because... what do you even DO with that. Also I feel like there must be some clause of Godwin's Law that applies here :P
I think I speak on behalf of [personal profile] cahn when I say that if you wanted to research the historicity of this claim, we would be very grateful!
You do! Gossipy sensationalism at its finest!
Re: Goldstone is wrong, chapters 2 and 3
Date: 2021-09-27 01:18 pm (UTC)I realized last night that I *do* know what to do with this kind of reasoning: I've seen it before.
One component of the grad school program I attended was comparative mythology, and I can tell you that this kind of reasoning is endemic in that field. For example: Homer has his heroes being cremated. Second-millenium Mycenaeans did not cremate their dead. Proto-Indo-Europeans in the steppes of Kazakhstan at some point in the third or fourth millennium did. Therefore Homer is revealing that the tradition of a super archaic practice was preserved through millennia of oral poetry!
Except that many Greeks of Homer's time practiced cremation. Why don't we assume that Homer was describing a practice familiar to him and his listeners from their own time and place?
This is the Wishful Thinking Aetiology Fallacy, according to the name that I just made up, and Goldstone isn't the only one guilty of it. (But with a dose of Godwin's Law that makes it extra special, in this case.)
Re: Goldstone is wrong, chapters 2 and 3
Date: 2021-09-29 02:43 pm (UTC)But speaking of Förster, he has one sentence on it in his section on Grenadier recruiting - Für einen großen Nachwuchs suchte der König durch Verheirathung der Grenadiere mit ebenbürtigen Landestöchtern zu sorgen und forderte auch aus den Provinzen Bericht über große Kinder ein. - but he doesn't tell me where he got it from. He also includes what seems to be a rather widespread Giants anecdote, which sounds very much like a legend to me: Allegedly, FW went for a ride near Potsdam, saw a tall peasant girl and told his adjutant to sent her to town with the order to immediately marry one of the Grenadiers. The girl got suspicious, gave the letter with the order to an old woman to deliver, who was then married to said Grenadier despite all protests. When FW noticed later, he annulled the marriage.
One other thing I found, in a 2007 book about the Giants: "considerations of his regimental medic prompted Friedrich Wilhelm to attempt to marry grenadiers to tall women". That detail seems oddly specific, but it doesn't give a name or even a year, let alone a citation. (That said, one of the book's sources is Kloosterhuis' Lange Kerls tome, which is mostly a publication of primary sources related to them, including social life and marriages. If there's any actual evidence to be found beyond anecdotes, it's probably in there.)
Re: Goldstone is wrong, chapters 2 and 3
Date: 2021-09-29 04:11 pm (UTC)That said, one of the book's sources is Kloosterhuis' Lange Kerls tome, which is mostly a publication of primary sources related to them, including social life and marriages. If there's any actual evidence to be found beyond anecdotes, it's probably in there.
Oh, wonderful! If I understand correctly,