18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 37

[cahn]

More diaries of our favorite 18th-century Prussian diary-keeper have been unearthed and have been synopsized!

January 18th: Blessed be thou to me! Under your light, my Prince Heinrich was born!

Comments

Re: Most ruthless?

[mildred_of_midgard]

Ha! I was hoping you would have more context, and you delivered. (I did not feel particularly inspired to go do any detective work on Goebbels' diary.)

I notice he doesn’t mention - or does he? - that Goebbels’ opinion in this competition of ruthlessness was temporary and also triggered by jealousy

No, of course not, at least not in the sample. As far as I can tell, the book goes like this:

Page 1: Fritz is worse than Hitler.
Pages 2-end: The rest is details.

There's a reason I haven't read this yet and don't plan to pay full price even if I do. (Whereas I bought Füssel a while back on your recommendation, just need time to read it.)

Poor AW. Not enough that his life went the way it did, he also gets compared to Hermann G.

Poor AW!

Re: Most ruthless?

[selenak]

I did not feel particularly inspired to go do any detective work on Goebbels' diary.

I don't blame you. I never read it completely, either, but I am familiar with excerpts from the seminars on propaganda I attended and from them getting quoted in other history works. BTW, aside from everything else, let's not forget Goebbels thought he was writing for eternity and that in future days when scholars devoutly studied the story of the glorious Third Reich, they would of course regard his diaries as gospel, and him as the most competent, the smartest, the most faithful paladin while everyone else sucked by comparison. You won't find descriptions of things like his two years long affair with Lida Baarova in there. (Let alone the countless other affairs, for he exploited his position as de facto film boss of Germany to the full.) So whatever Goebbels says is already filtered through this agenda, not a direct hotline to what he actually thought at the time.

To return to the original point of comparison, it never ceases to amaze me - and illustrate how much these monsters believed their own lies - that Goebbels told Hitler about Roosevelt's death by saying "The Czarina Elizabeth has died". Truman really, really, REALLY isn't Peter III style into you!

Re: Most ruthless?

[cahn]

To return to the original point of comparison, it never ceases to amaze me - and illustrate how much these monsters believed their own lies - that Goebbels told Hitler about Roosevelt's death by saying "The Czarina Elizabeth has died". Truman really, really, REALLY isn't Peter III style into you!

WOW.
I realize it isn't really funny, but I laughed anyway, in sheer disbelief! That's... something else.
(I am sure you've told me this before, but now I have the context to appreciate just how screwy that is...)

Re: Most ruthless?

[selenak]

If you want to practice your German, or employ some Google Translate, here are a few articles about Hitler and Goebbels assuming they finally got their very own Miracle of the House of Brandenburg (one even mentions Goebbels had been reading from Carlyle's Fritz biography to Hitler before that):

https://www.spiegel.de/politik/lateinisches-gift-a-84b90632-0002-0001-0000-000045137657

https://www.wis-potsdam.de/de/zentrum-militaergeschichte-und-sozialwissenschaften-bundeswehr-zmsbw/1762-2022-wunder-des-hauses

https://www.welt.de/geschichte/zweiter-weltkrieg/article139320884/Als-der-gefaehrlichste-Mann-des-Krieges-starb.html

Miracle of the House of Brandenburg (NOT)

[cahn]

Thanks! I guess I can kind of see... Roosevelt being sort of this figure that loomed large enough that when he died more-or-less out of the blue, it seemed like it was providence, or their own Miracle of the House of Brandenburg.

But on the other hand, like you say... comparing Peter III! to Truman!

Re: Miracle of the House of Brandenburg (NOT)

[selenak]

One of the articles I mentioned says Hitler did expect one of the Allies to die and thus be his Miracle only he thought it would be Churchill. This at least isn't out of this world - with Churchill's smoking, hard drinking life style, he could have kicked the bucket at any point, whereas I don't think Roosevelt's actual state of health was known overseas, what with even reporters not taking pictures of him in his wheelchair -, and given Hitler had some British upper class fans (including the Duke of Windsor, and of course Unity Mitford), he may have deluded himself in the event of Churchill's death he'd get an appeasing government in Britain next, thus overlooking that the mood in the 1940s wasn't anything like it had been in 1938, and so even if Churchill HAD died, there wouldn't have been an equivalent of Peter III. coming to power next. As for Truman...

Re: Miracle of the House of Brandenburg (NOT)

[cahn]

Ah, yeah, I can see thinking that Churchill dying would be beneficial to them, but yes, I can't imagine it actually would have been!

Re: Most ruthless?

[mildred_of_midgard]

let's not forget

By which we mean, "Thank you for telling us, Selena, because we never learned this to forget it in the first place." :)

You probably know this already, but American education on WWII and the Holocaust is pretty sparse compared to the same in Europe. I have seen some significant culture clashes just based on "Is X emotionally charged for you, because the first thing that comes to mind for you when you see it is the Holocaust, or is the connection of X to the Holocaust something you've never heard of, or at best an obscure historical fact you might have learned once for an exam and then forgotten?"

Mind you, I've seen the same in reverse for the genocide of Native Americans!

it never ceases to amaze me - and illustrate how much these monsters believed their own lies - that Goebbels told Hitler about Roosevelt's death by saying "The Czarina Elizabeth has died".

Yep! That's the first sentence of Szabo's book:

On the evening of Friday 13 April 1945, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels excitedly phoned General Theodor Busse, commander of the German 9th Army on the Eastern Front, and announced: 'The Czarina is dead!'

5 sentences later, you get the "not as ruthless as Fritz" comparison.

Truman really, really, REALLY isn't Peter III style into you!

I think we're all thankful Truman was the anti-Peter III!

Re: Most ruthless?

[cahn]

By which we mean, "Thank you for telling us, Selena, because we never learned this to forget it in the first place." :)

HAHA QUOTED FOR TRUTH

You probably know this already, but American education on WWII and the Holocaust is pretty sparse compared to the same in Europe.

Yes, for sure. Although I will say that my education on WWI was an order of magnitude worse than my education on WWII, because at least for the latter I got some pop WWII fictionalization and so on, but there was much less of that for WWI.