18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 35

[cahn]

In the previous post Charles II found AITA:

Look, I, m, believe in live and let live. (And in not going on my travels again. Had enough of that to last a life time.) Why can't everyone else around me be more chill? Instead, my wife refuses to employ my girlfriend, my girlfriend won't budge and accept another office, my brother is set on a course to piss off everyone (he WILL go on his travels again), and my oldest kid shows signs of wanting my job which is just not on, sorry to say. And don't get me started about Mom (thank God she's living abroad). What am I doing wrong? AITA?

Comments

Re: A little more on Zweig

[selenak]

I feel like Zweig seems very invested in his narrative that all of MT's kids were just ne'er-do-wells.

consider the time of writing here. Zweig was part of a generation that was raised and went to school in the fading Austrian Empire, where nationalism and uncriticial Habsburg worship contributed majorly to WWI (just as uncritical Hohenzollern worship and nationalism did in Germany). Zweig was also one of the very few anti-war literati from the get go in WWI, and a life long pacifist as the result of the WWI horrors. Just like a century plus of Fritz worship plus 20th century history led to a much more critical evaluation in the 20th, there was a corresponding backlash in Austria. Not to mention that Zweig's generation was the first to have unlimited access to the state archives (as opposed to previous times, when historians like Arneth did but not everyone else who wanted it). So when you're raised on a super rosy picture of the Habsburgs, have seen that kind of uncritical glorification lead to hell and then get exposed to the family papers....

Language: Zweig writes beautiful German, that's why I'm very glad Mildred read it in the original. Yes, longer sentences, but believe me, they just flow of the tongue if you read them. How much that's reproducable in English, I don't know, not having read the English translation.