18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 36

[cahn]

Starting a couple of comments earlier than usual to mention there are a couple of new salon fics! These probably both need canon knowledge.

felis ficlets on siblings!

Siblings (541 words) by felisnocturna
Chapters: 2/2
Fandom: 18th Century CE RPF
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great, Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf, August Wilhelm von Preußen | Augustus William of Prussia (1722-1758), Wilhelmine von Preußen | Wilhelmine of Prussia (1709-1758)
Summary:

Three Fills for the 2022 Three Sentence Ficathon.

Chapter One: Protective Action / Babysitting at Rheinsberg (Frederick/Fredersdorf, William+Henry+Ferdinand)
Chapter Two: Here Be Lions (Wilhelmine)

Unsent Letters fic by me:

Letters for a Dead King (1981 words) by raspberryhunter
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 18th Century CE RPF
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great & Friedrich Heinrich Ludwig von Preußen (1726-1802)
Characters: Friedrich Heinrich Ludwig von Preußen | Henry of Prussia (1726-1802)
Additional Tags: Epistolary, Love/Hate, Talking To Dead People, Canonical Character Death, Dysfunctional Family
Summary:

Just because one's king and brother is dead doesn't mean one has to stop writing to him.

Comments

More Peter Hagendorf

[mildred_of_midgard]

German wiki has some interesting (to me, anyway) information on the historiography of his diary: it only turned up in 1988, having languished in archives until then, and it didn't even mention his name! Scholars had to do research to figure out who he even was.

The key turns out to be the very passage I reproduced in the last post, where he records the birthplace, date, and name of his daughter Margareta. The historian who turned up his diary looked through the church records, which, amazingly, survived (it's probably not an accident that she was born in 1645, i.e. close to the end of the war, because so many German churches were destroyed during the war that records before 1648 are sparse), and included an entry for a Margareta, same date, same place, daughter of a Peter Hagendorf. So the historian who translated and published the diary took a guess that the diarist's name was Hagendorf.

The guess didn't turn into a claim in which historians have confidence until 2004, when more archival evidence surfaced.

In 2018, Juliana da Costa José developed a profile of Peter Hagendorf using the methods of operational case analysis and based on this the thesis that he could come from the High Fläming and have gone back there. She turned to Müller, who informed the historian Hans Medick. Together with the handwriting expert Claudia Minuth, they found entries in Gorizia's church books from 1649. Apparently, Hagendorf arrived in Gorizia with his family in autumn 1649, because from November 9th "Peter Hagendorf, a soldier" and "Anna Maria Hagendorf, wife of Peter Hagendorf" and descendants of the two mentioned several times. Müller and Medick analyzed the presumed way back in terms of plausibility and made historical observations on the reason for return, such as punitive regulations and resettlement measures that ordered military personnel and refugees who had been scattered in Saxony-Anhalt to return to their places of origin in order to repopulate the orphaned areas. The church book entries could be confirmed by these investigations.

On February 4th / February 14, 1679 ^greg. der alte M: Peter Hagen was buried in Görzke at the age of 77. Medick concludes from the currently available data that the funeral entry mentioned is that of the soldier Peter Hagendorf, who demonstrably had his son of the same name baptized there in November 1649. According to Medick, there are indications that this Peter Hagendorf was elected "mayor and judge". Calculating backwards, the year of birth would be 1601 or 1602.

So when Münkler says we don't know what happened to the 2 kids who survived infancy after the war, he presumably didn't know about Medick's 2018 research, since Münkler's own book was published in 2018. Of course, Medick could also be wrong, but I went looking up Hagendorf's wiki entry precisely to see if we knew how long the kids survived, and it didn't surprise me that at least the wiki editor thinks we do, and it sounds plausible!

Per wikipedia, he had 4 children with his first wife, none of whom survived (and she died in childbirth, per the entry I reproduced), and 10 with his second wife, of whom only 4 survive to adulthood. The two that Münkler mentions, because they were born during the war and are thus recorded in the diary, plus two that are born after the war (and presumably had better survival odds!), which were found recently in the archives.

Historians really are detectives! I like how da Costa José leaned into that and decided to just treat this as a cold case investigation. :D

This wiki summary of the diary was also interesting:

He shows feelings about things that obviously inspire him, such as nature, mills and architecture. Between the phases of the battle, he describes nature and landscapes verbosely, in detail and with great clarity, showing a lively interest in the respective inhabitants and their culinary peculiarities. He does not glorify war. Hagendorf describes the horrors that he has to witness, but also those he causes himself, in a distant way. Nor does he skimp on self-critical illumination of his own person. This is how his tendency to alcoholism is described, which he usually has well under control, but which gets him into trouble, mostly of a financial nature, if he gets through it. He genuinely loves his women. He describes his children reservedly, as long as they are still infants. Only when the first, the son Melchior Christoph, reaches the toddler age, does his description becomes warmer and more emotional. When the child begins to become aware of things around him, he takes care of him and places him with a schoolmaster until the end of the war.

Also this:

In 1648 Hagendorf acquired 12 sheets of fine paper from his pay, which he tied together with sturdy thread to write down his wartime experiences. The diary was most certainly the fair copy of many slips of paper. The historian Marco von Müller found in his master's thesis that it can be proven that pieces of paper were mixed up or lost; in some places, parts of the text are not entirely conclusive and sound as if they were reconstructed from memory.

See, this is why, when betaing for cahn's Christmas with the Hohenzollerns fic, I suggested Fritz gift Fredersdorf a bound journal to write in: that would have been non-trivial for someone of Fredersdorf's background to come by!

In conclusion, "18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, and Also Whoever Catches Our Interest, Be It 11th-Century Matilda of Tuscany or 17th-Century Charles "AITA" II and Peter Hagendorf." :) Aka "Operation Learn German First, Then Go Back to the 18th Century."

Re: More Peter Hagendorf

[luzula]

I read the previous comment about him, with all his children dying, OMG, and what a life his wife (or wives) must have led, with all those pregnancies! And that's some cool detective work by the historians...

Re: More Peter Hagendorf

[selenak]

I can only recommend Die Eiserne Zeit, the six part docu miniseries about the Thirty Years war, if you can get it in Sweden, and since there were several Swedish historians interviewed for it as well, and it was a European production, I hope you can. It tells the story of the war by following several individuals as a red thread; Peter Hagendorf is one of them, another is Anna Margaretha Wrangel, who starts out as a child orphan whose entire family gets massacred in Magdeburg when the Catholic forces take the city and ends up marrying one of the richest Swedes (partly courtesy of the war) around at the time, Carl Gustaf Wrangel. Peter Hagendorf, though possibly Lutheran himself, mostly (though not exclusively) fought for the Catholics and got a severe wound right at the start of the Magdeburg conquering, which meant he couldn't participate in the plunder, which meant his (first) wife did, not least because otherwise their little family would have starved. One of the aspects I learned through the documentary illustrates is that after the initial phase of the war, a good many soldiers got married and hence their wives and ensuing babies became part of the army, for the simple reason that all sides ravaged the countryside and so lots of women must have figured that it was (relatively) safer to marry a soldier and get that bit of protection by travelling as a part of his army than to stay in a village where the soldiers (of all sides) marching through would often beat, rape or kill you. The soldiers were often paid this way - by being given leave to plunder initially hostile, later all territory. And of course once a soldier had to care for a wife and children as well, whatever actual money he (irregularly) got was even less sufficient. So once a city was conquered, all the wives going in along with the soldiers to plunder seems to have been the norm. (In the case of Peter Hagendorf at Magdeburg, his survival was very uncertain - he had a head wound - and their current baby was sick, so his wife going was what kept them alive for a few months more. What makes Die Eiserne Zeit so good is that thus in the Magdeburg episode, for example, you don't have just the generals' povs as per usual (though they are present as well), you get most of the episode time learning about the ground level via the fates of Anna Maria (whose (Protestant) family got massacred and who herself only survived because she managed to reach the shelter of a Catholic nunnery, where she'd live for some years until leaving and ending up with the Swedes on the one hand, and that of Peter Hagendorf and his family on the other.

Re: More Peter Hagendorf

[mildred_of_midgard]

O Most Royal of Readers, ma très chère Selena, would you have any interest in reading his diary for us, when your schedule permits? Only 272 pages, and Wiki says Peters translated it into modern German, so no linguistic headaches there, at least. And published in 1993, so hopefully short on the most awful of all possible editorial opinions.

Please accept my tender solicitudes for your recovery from the conference of hell,
Your most faithful and obedient detective,
etc.

Re: More Peter Hagendorf

[selenak]

Dearest Detective, I already read this book two years ago, for verily, the Stabi has it, and it is a double edition (original baroque German and modern German translation) with two most intriguing prefaces by the original researcher, the first from the original publication in the 1990s, when he didn't know yet the name of the diarist, and a second one upon republication a few years ago, where he summarizes all that became known about Peter Hagendorf since then. However, two years ago you, oh my fellow salon frequenters, were not yet interested in the Thirty Years War, and so I did not create a write up. I could reorder the book and do it then, but this will have to wait until July, as I am in Bamberg right now, and then in June there might be a journey to foreign shores. As the emergency rules have been dropped, I don't think the Stabi still does mailing service, so I will have to pick it up in Munich.

Yours still exhausted, but willing to serve.

Re: More Peter Hagendorf

[mildred_of_midgard]

Aha, I should have known a reader as royal as you would be on top of it already! July is fine, no hurry.

for verily, the Stabi has it

I know--you lucky! I looked into what it would take for me to get a copy, and then, "Forty dollars?! Guess I'll ask Selena to read it for free."

Re: More Peter Hagendorf

[luzula]

Thanks for the rec! : ) I'll see if I can get hold of it...

Re: More Peter Hagendorf

[cahn]

Wow, I didn't know about the wives going in to plunder too. I mean, it makes sense in an awful kind of way, but it would not have occurred to me.

Re: More Peter Hagendorf

[cahn]

Wow, that's pretty cool historian work there!

This part was so sad to me:
He describes his children reservedly, as long as they are still infants. Only when the first, the son Melchior Christoph, reaches the toddler age, does his description becomes warmer and more emotional.

:(