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

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

selenak

Does Mortimer say anything about Golo Mann? Other than Schiller, Golo (son of Thomas, nephew of Heinrich, brother of Klaus) is probably the best known German writer about Wallenstein, and he didn't write a drama or novel, but a non-fictional biography.

(There's also Alfred Döblin's novel "Wallenstein" as the third best known written in German take, but that's faded from the public consciousness by now. Back then in Weimar Germany, it was a sensation because Döblin was otherwise known for his social present day novels like Berlin, Alexanderplatz, not for the historical genre.)

Note: I haven't read Golo Mann's biography yet, but it really is the best known in German, and he won lots of awards for it.

Re: astrology, sounds as if Mortimer has a case. And yes, extremely interesting about Kepler. Incidentally, when I was in Regensburg some months ago, I found the Kepler museum closed, alas, but I did stand in front of the two houses where he lived while there. I wasn't conscious of the Wallenstein association, though Kepler is associated with another phenomenon of the time: the witch craze, which rose to unprecedented bloody heights during the same 30 Years War years, and to which Kepler's mother Katharina nearly fell victim to. Kepler rushed back to defend her when he heard she'd been accused, and as one of the very few cases, managed to pull it off. (

cahn, there are two operas about Katharina! One by Hindemith, and a very recent one (from 2021) by one Volker Plangg.

Edited Date: 2022-06-11 07:35 am (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

~~3 mentions of Mann~~ and one of Döblin in Mortimer.

[ETA: I'm an idiot. When you asked this question, my reaction was "All the time!" Then when I went to consult the Kindle search function, I went, "Obviously need to search 'Golo', 'Mann' will have too many hits." So yes, he mentions Mann a *lot*, as my memory suggests, I had just forgotten by the time I finished writing the post and translating all the quotes that I had searched for his first name, not his last.]

One of the Mann mentions is indeed astrology:

Golo Mann said categorically that Wallenstein believed "in the accuracy and precise readability of the tremendous flickering writing of the nocturnal heavens", and that he "absolutely trusted" the prophecy of the astrologer Kepler, "just as we do the expert reading of the rays that are shined through our bodies."

The other mentions are just "Why is it necessary for me to write a new biography of Wallenstein, when Mann's exists?" (answer: because it's 40 years old and 1100 pages long, and we need something that's more modern and also doesn't include every single detail), and "How famous is Wallenstein now that he's dead?" (answer: in the twentieth century, we got not only a novel by Döblin, but at least half a dozen others).

In conclusion, Mortimer does seem to at least be aware of the existence of German literature, fictional and non-fictional, on his subject.

to which Kepler's mother Katharina nearly fell victim to. Kepler rushed back to defend her when he heard she'd been accused, and as one of the very few cases, managed to pull it off.

This I didn't know! I mean, I know nothing about Kepler's life, just his scientific contributions. I hadn't known that he did horoscopes either.

Edited Date: 2022-06-11 01:46 pm (UTC)

From:

selenak

Good for Mortimer. Re: Katharina Kepler, check out her German wiki entry, which is way longer than the brief English one I linked. She was an innkeeper's daughter who worked at her father's inn and married Kepler's father Heinrich most likely because she got pregnant by him. Unfortunately, he turned out to be a brute. (According to his son's memoirs.) Also he ran off and left her with two children to fend for herself. She travelled after him, tracked him down and shamed him into coming back. They ran an inn together for a few years, but he got punished by the city for "bad behavior" and then ran away for good to become a mercenary. (How do we know all this? Because it was brought up at her witch trial as evidence against her, i.e. she had driven her husband away by "sorcery" and thus caused him to die a miserable soldier's death, why else would he have left?) This time, Katharina didn't bother, and managed to support her family on her lonesome. Said family included her aged father who lived with her and whom she had to nurse, and when he died after five years, she inherited from him which together with her own earnings was enough to finance her son's going to university. A strong-willed, energetic woman, but unfortunately that also meant she made enemies, and when one of them denounced her as a witch, the whole machinery got going. It took years and years and years (first accusation: 1615; Katharina finally freed for good: 1621), and date wise must have overlapped with his Wallenstein acquaintance.

ETA: And here's a vid in English about the two Keplers - 'The Astronomer and the Witch'. /ETA

Re: Wallenstein the astrology believer, admittedly that is such a well known trait of his in Germany that "name of Wallenstein's main astrologer" is a popular crossword puzzle question. (Answer: Seni.) And that is definitely due to Schiller.

Edited Date: 2022-06-11 03:21 pm (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

I will check her out, thanks! This is why salon is so great: reporting what you read leads to learning new things. :D

Re: Wallenstein the astrology believer, admittedly that is such a well known trait of his in Germany that "name of Wallenstein's main astrologer" is a popular crossword puzzle question. (Answer: Seni.) And that is definitely due to Schiller.

Didn't know that! But it makes sense, given how much Mortimer complains that people get their impression of Wallenstein from Schiller rather than meticulous primary source research.

From:

cahn

...I mean, this sounds awful for Katarina but also she is super awesome and I can see how she got made into operas!

From:

cahn

Go Katarina and Kepler <3

Hindemith! That's interesting -- is it performed much in Germany?

From:

selenak

Instinctually and without looking anything up, I'd say no, at least I didn't see it on the schedule of the big operas (Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt) in recent years.

From:

cahn

I had to hunt around for a while before I found anything like a (partial) recording on Spotify! (Although it appears to be based on a symphonic work that is a bit easier to find.) I listened to it a bit and it sounds interesting! Hindemith is not someone I know really anything about, but I'd watch that once at least :)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

On the subject of famous people's mothers who are interesting in their own right, I just ran across a bio of Mary Ann Costello, mother of prime minister George Canning. She was an actress, and as you can probably guess, treated badly by 18th century society and often by the men around her. (Her contemporary Emma Hamilton says hi.)

I haven't read the bio, George Canning is My Son, which turned up by accident in a google search for Guy Dickens (she was his granddaughter), but the Kindle sample looks interesting. I'm not exactly dying to know more about her, but I think I speak for

cahn when I say I would not say no to a

selenak write-up, if said Selena had the time and interest at any point. ;)

From: (Anonymous)

She does look interesting, and I will read the book, but I don't know yet when I will write the review. :)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

No worries! And if you never write it up, that's fine too. One, it's not like it's a Katte execution primary source, which you were consistently generous about <3, and two, it's not like I don't live in a glass house of not writing up everything I read!

(Still meaning to do that Brühl post, still need to get enough sleep to finish plowing through this book.)