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

Backstory!

[cahn]

So I was all "nope definitely do not have the time to do Unsent Letters" and then selenak went out on the post-deadline pinch-hit list, and then she stayed on the pinch-hit list, and I was like, "well, maybe I could write a thousand words?" and Mildred said she'd be up for beta. I was taken with your prompt on Joseph writing to his dead mother, but it became very swiftly clear that was Not Feasible (nor that Mildred would be able to help beta as thoroughly as usual), and I also wrote about 300 words of Timov, but wasn't confident about being able to get that done either, and then I got interested in the prompt where Heinrich was reading Wilhelmine's memoirs for the first time, and combining that with the original prompt of interest Joseph writing to MT, and perhaps subconsciously thinking of Beale's analogy of Joseph:MT::Heinrich:Friedrich...

Since the vast majority of canon we have for Heinrich and Fritz in this era is encapsulated in Ziebura, that also made it a lot easier (if it had been something for which I'd have needed several sources of canon review like Voltaire, I don't think it would have been possible, willing beta or no). (I didn't consult Trier myself, but Mildred did for beta.)

Anyway, I am a little miffed that I didn't sign up now, because I want selenak's epistolary! :)

-Mildred and I went back and forth about how to translate mon très cher frère, but I finally went for "My dear brother" as the best compromise between something that sounds like a formal salutation in English without being too over-the-top to modern eyes, as "My very dear brother" looks to me, and not as jarring as using a French salutation would be.

-The paragraphs that Mildred wrote are "I've waited and waited..." down to "My efforts." I'd written a version with the same factual content, and much of the phrasing Mildred kept, but she took it from being a more-or-less bloodless recap of Ziebura to Heinrich actually sounding upset, and I liked her version so much I mostly kept it :)

-Totally random noob question that I have wondered for ages: when someone closes a letter e.g. "I form the most sincere wishes for your preservation, my very dear brother, while giving you thanks for the fruits which you deigned to send me, being, etc." is the "etc" actually transcribed literally from the letter, or is it the transciber's shorthand for "yours, Heinrich"? (I probably should have asked this literally years ago, lol, because I've always wondered.)

[cahn]

felis, mildred_of_midgard mentioned that you had put your ficlets up on AO3 -- can I link to them in the post? I would have linked already but they are locked, and I didn't want to link if you don't want me to. (I did, I think, previously link your "Blackbirds" poem, not realizing it was locked -- sorry if I shouldn't have done that, and I can edit if you'd rather I didn't!)

Re: Backstory!

[felis]

Aw, I didn't get around to commenting before reveals. I'd forgotten how many different things Heinrich tried after Fritz' death and that he got rebuffed by not just one but two successors. The "waited and waited" was rather heartbreaking.
I also love how well this got the love/hate across - I knew that "I will not miss you at all" would be famous last words, but it was still very touching to follow. (... now I'm wondering how that would have gone if he hadn't been ignored after Fritz' death!) The obelisk letter was fun and the way you invent/use the Amalie music anecdote to show us something about all three characters was just wonderful. Also, the "I would be seen truly" was just as much of a surprisingly poignant (self-)insight as Fritz' "autre-moi-même". And trying to needle Fritz' ghost into coming back! Aw. <3

is the "etc" actually transcribed literally from the letter, or is it the transciber's shorthand for "yours, Heinrich"

I'm pretty sure it's the latter.

sounds like a formal salutation in English without being too over-the-top to modern eyes, as "My very dear brother" looks to me

Interesting. I might have gone with the more rococo version myself, precisely because it's so typical for the time period, but I can see why you guys came down on the other choice. It's hard enough to judge tone in the originals.

One other thing that stuck out to me: And when it was perfect (I did good work!) you never admitted it. - Is this meant as selective memory on Heinrich's part, or is your premise that he never got to hear Fritz' praise? I seem to remember that he was present for one of the post-Seven-Year-War speeches for example, but I could also see that he would choose not to remember that, given the whole kerfuffle regarding the proper salute immediately after the war, having to step back into the ranks after he was basically second-in-command.

[felis]

It's fine! The Thirteen Ways poem wasn't actually locked when you linked it, I only did that a couple months ago when the kudos bot kept hitting works by people on my reading list. I didn't want that to happen to any of my works, nor for any other bots to crawl them, that's why it's all archive-locked now. But linking is fine, if you don't mind linking to archive-locked things.

Re: Backstory!

[mildred_of_midgard]

And when it was perfect (I did good work!) you never admitted it. - Is this meant as selective memory on Heinrich's part, or is your premise that he never got to hear Fritz' praise?

She and I didn't discuss this, so I'll have to wait to see what cahn intended, but I read it as selective memory/hyperbole in the heat of anger, which is exactly how dysfunctional families fight, *cough*, not that I would know. ;)

Me and my sister: "You never let us go anywhere when we were growing up!"

My mother: *enumerates 5 times we were allowed to go somewhere without the school or immediate family supervising*

Me and my sister: "The fact that you can count 18 years' worth of examples on one hand is exactly making our point for us!"

IMO, Heinrich would be a model of self-restraint if he *didn't* say something like "You never!" to Fritz at some point.

ETA: I chatted with my wife about this over breakfast, because our respective dysfunctional familes are a frequent topic of discussion (as with Cahn and me, actually, lol), and we agreed that people say "You never" because it feels *emotionally* true, and then because it's not literally true it opens you up to counterattack. (Actually, if you read books on family therapy and couples therapy, therapists devote a certain amount of time to helping people find more constructive means of communicating their emotional truths to get them out of this unproductive "You never!" "Yes I did!" cycle.) The upshot is that Heinrich felt underappreciated even if there were literal examples of Fritz appreciating him.

I might have gone with the more rococo version myself, precisely because it's so typical for the time period, but I can see why you guys came down on the other choice. It's hard enough to judge tone in the originals.

Yeah, I was torn. Does one translate the words or the meaning? In our discussion, I ended up drawing a parallel between Heinrich's obligatory "my very dear brother" to a brother who was not at all dear to him, mixed feelings notwithstanding, and "Dear Hiring Manager," where the salutation is so obligatory that it loses all meaning. Part of me felt like "My very dear" in modern English would be misleading.

Re: Backstory!

[mildred_of_midgard]

-The paragraphs that Mildred wrote are "I've waited and waited..." down to "My efforts." I'd written a version with the same factual content, and much of the phrasing Mildred kept, but she took it from being a more-or-less bloodless recap of Ziebura to Heinrich actually sounding upset, and I liked her version so much I mostly kept it :)

I was surprised to see you say I'd written them! In my mind, you wrote them. I just rephrased them to turn past tense action words ("I wrote and I waited and I could tell he thought") into present tense emotion words ("I can't believe"), and then you touched up the prose for the final draft. Collaborative effort. :)

-Totally random noob question that I have wondered for ages:

Not a noob question, I wasn't sure either!

Also, as cahn says on AO3, "from beyond the river Styx" was a collaborative effort! She had "from Hades," but I had always been taught that Hades was used by the Greeks (and Pluto by Romans) primarily as the person, not the place, and for the place you used something like "house of Hades." Googling and also searching Trier confirmed this: well past our period, "Hades" as a place is predominantly *Christian* usage, not Classics-emulating usage like Fritz and Heinrich's in-group.

And because in the 18th century, the Romans are more in vogue than the Greeks, what Fritz uses most often is "chez Pluton" and "l'empire de Pluton." So I suggested that or the slightly poetic "beyond the river Styx" (Fritz does refer to the Styx a lot, just not that exact phrasing) that popped into my head, and Cahn went with the latter.

Training one's successor

[mildred_of_midgard]

In our last post, selenak wrote:

Richelieu: one of the very few men of power not afraid to find and train a gifted successor to take their place, which meant that after his death, the system they'd built around them didn't collapse.

And this is very true, and we are indeed looking at you, Fritz.

But from my recent reading I can give an example of a *woman* of power doing it!

Back in 11th century Italy, Salic law was in force, meaning women could not inherit. But as we've seen in Europe during our much later period, women could totally be regents for their sons, or for their husbands if they were sick or away fighting wars.

Well, when Matilda of Tuscany was a child, her father died. Her mother took over as regent for their son Frederick.

Then Frederick died. Technically, the imperial possessions should have reverted to the Holy Roman Emperor to dispose of to one of his followers, buuuut, the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope were not on great terms (this is the lead-in to the big Investiture Controversy), and Matilda's family was taking the Pope's side, so they just kind of hung on with papal support.

Meaning Matilda's mother, Beatrice, kept ruling. Now, Matilda had been married off to her stepbrother, the duke of Lorraine. But at one point, she decided to leave her husband and come home. She pushed for a divorce and wanted to enter a nunnery, but the Pope very much did not want her to. He and everyone else pushed back and urged her to reconcile with her husband; she refused.

Eventually, Beatrice gave up on Matilda ever going back to Lorraine, and she started including her daughter in all her governing activities. Beatrice knew the only way for a woman to succeed a woman, totally illegally, was if the woman was well entrenched in power when her predecessor died. And the only way Beatrice was able to stay in power was by traveling throughout her realms, being very hands-on, and making sure her subjects knew who she was and saw her as an authority figure (to be fair, this was extremely the norm for male rulers of the period--centralization was not yet a thing; peripatetic courts were).

So Beatrice and Matilda traveled, and Beatrice made sure everyone saw Matilda as an authority figure, so that when Beatrice died, the transfer of power to Matilda was, if not totally seamless, at least made possible. And Matilda kept ruling for another forty years, de facto if not de jure.

(She and her family were not extremely popular, incidentally. They faced a lot of rebellions, had to make concessions and play political games in order not to be locked out of major cities entirely, and the end of Matilda's reign, ca. 1110, is when Florence went, "Welp! We think we'd like to be a republic," and much of northern Italy started dissolving into the city states that we know and love (or love to hate?) from the Renaissance.)

By the way. The author of the bio I read, Elke Goez, speculates as to some reasons Matilda might have left her husband and refused to go back, stating that "how great her despair must have been can be seen from the fact that she took the difficult journey [over the Alps] south in winter." So, speculates Goez, maybe Matilda couldn't deal with her husband being a hunchback, or maybe her desire for a contemplative life as a nun was just that strong, or maybe she refused to be in a marriage where the woman wasn't an equal partner.

Does anyone else see a missing possible explanation there? Like that maybe her husband was awful to her? I have no evidence for this, but it seems a bit odd to omit it.

Anyway, props to Beatrice for seeing her daughter not as a threat but as the future.

Re: Backstory!

[mildred_of_midgard]

And to switch from characterization to history, I think the episode you're thinking of was when Fritz, after the Seven Years' War, raised a toast at dinner to Heinrich, the only one of the Prussian generals, Fritz included, who never made a mistake. Someone, maybe Krockow, said that Heinrich's response is unknown, but that he probably bowed in silence and returned to Rheinsberg asap.

I could see how something like that would make Heinrich feel even more underappreciated--like if Fritz could see that he was so good at what he did, why hold him back so much after the war? (The obvious answer being that Fritz could see exactly how good he was, and in Fritz's zero-sum power game, that meant a threat.)

Therapy for everyone, as I always say.

Re: Backstory!

[felis]

Yeah, that was one of the main anecdotes I had in mind, next to the bit where he acknowledged Heinrich's key role in the partition of Poland (if and when he felt like it). I seem to remember that Fritz praising Heinrich for his role in the war came up a couple of times - and of course he did put him in charge for a few days - although I would not know where to go for the primary sources at the moment. And yes re: holding him back after the war, that's why I brought up the symptomatic salute problem - although not to forget, once they hadn't talked for a year and Heinrich did give in and do the proper salute, Fritz promptly pulled him from the ranks again and had him ride by his side. Because of course he did. :P

But speaking of praising Heinrich, there's another instance I came across recently when I was reading the Rothenburg letters. Quote: My brother Henri distinguished himself extremely in our march of the 16th and we begin to know in the army his talents, of which I have spoken so often to you.
That's from October 1745, so well before the 1746 blow-up in which Fritz had an entirely different opinion on Heinrich's attitude towards the army, but I could easily see this as something that he didn't actually tell Heinrich to his face in 1745. Or maybe he did, who knows. But I was particularly surprised by the "so often" in that sentence when I read it. Heinrich might have been as well!

Re: Backstory!

[mildred_of_midgard]

next to the bit where he acknowledged Heinrich's key role in the partition of Poland (if and when he felt like it)

Yes, but by the 1780s he was giving himself and Joseph full credit, and in 1786, that's what's going to be fresh on Heinrich's mind!

It's funny, because when cahn wrote "if I managed to convince you, you would have probably decided it had been your idea all along," I commented while betaing, "Nice shout-out to the First Polish Partition!" To which she said she had forgotten about the partition credit-stealing and was just thinking, "What would Fritz do?" to which I said, "Exactly that!" :D

WWFD

Re: Backstory!

[mildred_of_midgard]

but I could easily see this as something that he didn't actually tell Heinrich to his face in 1745. Or maybe he did, who knows. But I was particularly surprised by the "so often" in that sentence when I read it. Heinrich might have been as well!

Indeed! But I suspect 1745 was before Fritz started to see Heinrich as a serious threat? So he was probably just pleased that his brothers wanted to be in his army. And I suspect anything he said before the 1746 watershed year (or at least from the evidence we have, I suspect it was something of a watershed year) would have been long forgotten by 1786, at least emotionally.

Re: Backstory!

[cahn]

<3 :)

(... now I'm wondering how that would have gone if he hadn't been ignored after Fritz' death!)

Me too! (Mildred and Selena, please write, or at least outline, this AU for us! :D )

So does etc. always mean basically "yours, [writer]" or is there like another whole line of flowery sentiments that the transcriber just got tired of transcribing?

Interesting. I might have gone with the more rococo version myself, precisely because it's so typical for the time period, but I can see why you guys came down on the other choice. It's hard enough to judge tone in the originals.

Yeah, my reasoning there was similar to Mildred's -- that my 21st-C eyes see "My dear brother" as something I might write as a (perhaps somewhat flowery) typical obligatory salutation, whereas "My very dear brother" is something I'd only write to a brother who was, well, very dear to me.

(Also informing this decision is my usual hilarious inability to history where, although I know I've looked vaguely at the Heinrich and AW letters before, I had only really read (and, I guess, remembered) the Wilhelmine letters. So up until, uh, writing this fic, I thought that maybe "ma très chère soeur" as a salutation might have been saying something about Wilhelmine and Fritz.)

One other thing that stuck out to me: And when it was perfect (I did good work!) you never admitted it. - Is this meant as selective memory on Heinrich's part, or is your premise that he never got to hear Fritz' praise? I seem to remember that he was present for one of the post-Seven-Year-War speeches for example

Hee, now the "never made a mistake" incident I did remember! But I decided Heinrich was not in the frame of mind where he'd go "You never even told me I did a good job! ...well, except for that one time, yeah, okay." So, basically, what mildred_of_midgard said about emotional truth, only I wouldn't have been able to articulate it as well as she did :)

Re: Backstory!

[cahn]

(Actually, if you read books on family therapy and couples therapy, therapists devote a certain amount of time to helping people find more constructive means of communicating their emotional truths to get them out of this unproductive "You never!" "Yes I did!" cycle.)

Oh huhhhhh. I know a reasonable amount about more effective forms of communicating in relationships, but it never really clicked for me that this is how they work better. It's always very educational to talk to you! :)

Re: Backstory!

[cahn]

Ohh... that's interesting! Now, my experiences have made me absolutely certain that Fritz would be capable of saying super nice things about Heinrich regularly to other people but not to Heinrich himself. (My mom does this regularly with my sister and me -- she'll say nice things about one of us to the other sister (and I think she brags about us to her friends), but she won't say the nice thing to the person whom it concerns! Which I know about because both sister and I then usually immediately tell each other, but we didn't learn how to do this reliably until we were both adults.)

[cahn]

Great, thanks! I've added it to the post :D

Re: Backstory!

[mildred_of_midgard]

So up until, uh, writing this fic, I thought that maybe "ma très chère soeur" as a salutation might have been saying something about Wilhelmine and Fritz.)

Not in that way, but remember this, though, your summary of their 1745 falling out letters?

2 Oct, F to W - "We have just defeated the Austrians."
19 Oct, W to F - You're the greatest, bro!
29 Oct, F to W - Thanks, sis! I am the greatest!
30 Dec, F to W - (Ma chere soeur instead of Ma tres chere, :(((((( ) - I just made peace with YOUR FRIEND

:D

Re: Backstory!

[mildred_of_midgard]

Lol, look at us applying our first-hand experience with dysfunctional families of the present to the study of dysfunctional families of the past. ;) And good for you and your sister, seriously.

Re: Backstory!

[mildred_of_midgard]

So does etc. always mean basically "yours, [writer]" or is there like another whole line of flowery sentiments that the transcriber just got tired of transcribing?

I'm pretty sure it's the latter, and that "your [flowery adjectives] servant" has got to be a major one. Comparing the Wilhelmine letters to Fritz in Trier to ones in the Bayreuth enthusiast collection, the former has a lot of "etc"s, (understandable given the sheer number of volumes Preuss was assembling!), and the latter has none and the editor consistently ends Wilhelmine's letters with repetitive flowery sentiments.

Bayreuth Enthusiasts, a 1757 letter:

Je suis avec tout le respect et la tendresse imaginable

Mon tres cher Frere
votre tres humble obeïssante
Soeur et Servante
Wilhelmine

Preuss, a 1756 letter:

Étant avec toute la tendresse et le respect imaginable, mon très-cher frère, etc.

So Preuss has to be eliding "Votre tres humble et tres obeïssante Soeur et servante Wilhelmine," or something very close to it.

Re: Backstory!

[mildred_of_midgard]

Yeah, I mean, there are lots of failure modes that are addressed by more effective means of communicating in relationships, but one of them is "You never!" "Yes I did!", or, more generally, "Attack!" "Defense and counterattack!"

Re: Backstory!

[felis]

Yeah, it always seems to be the formal and more or less flowery phrase of self-description + name that get omitted. I compared a couple of Fritz->Voltaire letters and while Preuss includes the closing "respect/tenderness/friendship" lines that are an actual part of the text and directly related to the recipient, he skips the final "your faithful friend, Frederic" or similar via the etc.
Another example are Fritz' letters to FW, where Preuss's etc replaces "Meines allergnädigsten Königs und Vaters getreu gehorsamster Diner und Sohn Friderich".

ETA: Which is to say - yes, flowery stuff gets omitted, but it seems like it's always formal flowery stuff which functionally amounts to today's "yours", nothing actually substantial in terms of compliments that the editor just got tired of or some such.

Re: Backstory!

[mildred_of_midgard]

Yes, precisely: it's the formula that gets omitted because the editor can trust the reader to supply the formula, and no information is lost. (Except to those of us who are like: "Wait, who's doing the omitting here?" ;) )

ETA: Also, I don't blame editors of the past for this, in the days when the traditional MO was to write everything out longhand and get your intellectually frustrated wife to type up your manuscript, but modern day editors have an excellent use case for a macro here! :P

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: Backstory!

[cahn]

I KNEW there was a reason I thought the "très chère soeur" thing was meaningful! Aw, Fritz.

Re: Backstory!

[cahn]

This is GREAT and I should clearly have asked this question before now -- I would have had a lot of fun with Heinrich starting out with ending his letters "Your very humble and very obedient brother and servant" and being all "...wait! I'm not humble OR obedient and I don't have to pretend to be any more!" But I guess fic!Heinrich got his point across either way.