cahn

Last post, we had (among other things) Danish kings and their favorites; Louis XIV and Philippe d'Orléans; reviews of a very shippy book about Katte, a bad Jacobite novel, and a great book about clothing; a fic about Émilie du Châtelet and Voltaire; and a review of a set of entertaining Youtube history videos about Frederick the Great.

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From:

mildred_of_midgard

Woohoo! It's fabulous that we have this, and all due to your initiative and Prinzsorgenfrei's help! And cahn creating the Fredersdorf Defense Fund!

I know, I'm so excited! (Also due to

gambitten telling us about this letter in the first place.)

My German is weak, my French is weak, my Danish is weak, my handwriting deciphering is weak...but the one thing I have in spades is initiative! I would love to be able to not have to depend on Prinzsorgenfrei for decipherments (aside from visiting Aurich), as I have a ton of material, and there's only so much you can ask someone else to do on your own research projects. (I have offered to pay, but still, time is time and Prinzsorgenfrei has their own thesis and soon MA to work on.) So it's very promising I was able to do this much of this letter all on my lonesome! (With the help of the cheat sheet for the alphabet that Prinzsorgenfrei shared long ago, of course--that thing has been a lifesaver.)

What happened was I ended up ordering all the Peter Keith protocols and the Leining to Fredersdorf correspondence, about 80 double-sided pages each, in January, because Prinzsorgenfrei said they had interest in and *might* have time for browsing through and looking for anything relevant to my research. I still hesitated over whether to pay for all the Peter Keith stuff, because Hinrichs and Kloosterhuis have been over that material with a fine-toothed comb, and I figured anything interesting had been published. Still, Peter wasn't Kloosterhuis' main interest, and I'm addicted to book-buying, so I got it.

Only after the material arrived last month did it occur to me that duh, published material was the answer to my prayers, because you may recall that back in the day, I asked Prinzsorgenfrei for transcriptions, because I knew the only way I was going to learn Kurrent was with a side-by-side transcription. So I started reading the inventory of Peter's rooms (which was good, as I caught a small mistake in my essay). And after finishing that, I found FW's 1730 letter to Pastor Müller in both facsimile and transcription form on the Prussian archive website page to help you learn handwriting, and I practiced on that. And while I was doing all this practice, every day I went and looked at the Leining letter to see if I was up for tackling it yet, and yesterday I was. I didn't think I'd get as far as I did, but by 9 pm I was like, "Sweet! I have enough I'm sending it directly to salon without going through Prinzsorgenfrei." (The difference between this and the Peter Keith letter is I don't want to publish it verbatim, I just want to cite it in defense of my argument. So not knowing every word and character is fine.)

I would like to save Prinzsorgenfrei for the things I really need and can't figure out on my own. And we're getting closer!

Meanwhile, thank you for the translation. Between the undeciphered words and the Rokoko German, that is better than I would have done, which was why I left it for you.

Also, re: "Your Grace" for "Euer Hochwohlgeboren" - I'm not completely happy with it, as "your Grace" implies nobility. Technically, so does Euer Hochwohlgeboren, but de facto, this is used to just signify superior position - for example, in the famous opening letter that starts the Goethe/Schiller correspondence, Schiller adresses Goethe as "Euer Hochwohlgeboren", and later once they've become closer completely skips it.

I noticed that! I'd made the educated guess it was just an honorific and didn't have to mean literal nobility in every case. I was going to say so, but I ran out of time before bed, and I can always count on you to say the things I thought about saying. ;)

Presumably the Glasow part is in the second postcript you haven't decyphered yet.

I don't see his name, but I do see it on the first page of the following letter, so we'll see how far I get today. If not today, hopefully this weekend!

Anyway: even accounting for the possibility that after April 3rd, some sort of bombshell drops re: Fredersdorf, this is a letter written to a man who knows he's dying and whose bad state of health is known to the letter writer.

It also proves what we already knew from the summary, namely that April 9th is not the date he was dismissed, as his position has already been given to Leining. Even if the whole "bad health" thing is a cover-up for embezzlement (which would be VERY strange given his death 9 months later), whatever that April 9 document is, it's not a cabinet order dismissing Fredersdorf. I really wish Wegfraß had given an exact citation. It's hard to refute something I haven't seen. But what I suspect is that it contains a mention of the fact that Fredersdorf no longer works in this position, and she's extrapolating from that to the Kiekemal affair, the same way she extrapolates from the lack of correspondence between Fritz and Fredersdorf (but WHY?? given we know correspondence was destroyed and also there was a war on!).

Now, Glasow was arrested in Saxony where Fritz and the army are, but the distance to Berlin even for the 18th century isn't so long that a good courier couldn't make it on the day of the arrest with orders to Leining to investigate.

Even better, the location of the letter, next to the date, is Lockewitz, which Wikipedia tells me is now in Dresden, and that "Frederick II of Prussia made Lockwitz his headquarters for a month in March 1757." So Leining is with Fritz when all this is going down. In fact, glancing through the locations on the upcoming letters, it looks like he stays near Fritz: he's in Leitmeritz in July, which, as we all know, is where Fritz was when he heard about AW's retreat.

I think Leining is administering the royal casket not from Berlin but from wherever Fritz is, and he's writing to Berlin to ask Fredersdorf to look into the archives there. I could be wrong, but both parts make sense.

an old professional

Oh, *that* makes sense! It was looking like "practious" to me, which I couldn't figure out, so I just left a bunch of Xs, but I suppose that could be "practiour" or even "practicur", which is close to "Praktiker", and these people switch back and forth between French and German and Frenchified German and Germanified French.

ETA: Yep. I just saw him write "Secretair" in the second postscript, and his 'c' in French does look exactly like an 'o'. So that's practicuX, where the final letter doesn't look like his other final 'r', but could easily be an r, and the ink is partially missing anyway. So we'll say it's an 'r', and good guess, Selena!

See, the larger the sample size, the easier the decipherment. You should have seen how many Xs there were in my first passthrough of the letter! I thought I was going to have to ask Prinzsorgenfrei for help. Then I went back over it, and was able to fill in a bunch of characters I had subsequently figured out, and went back over it again and filled in a bunch more, and so on about 5 times. (My technique, btw, is to count the number of lines in the page I'm deciphering, pre-fill my text editor with that many lines consisting of "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX", and then gradually replace Xs with characters (including spaces). This allows me to go, "Is this an 'r'? Let me see where he's written an 'r' before," then trace those previous 'r's back to the handwriting and stare at them for a comparison. It's slow, but it works!)

Son of ETA: That final letter looks a lot like his final 'r' in "Kammerier", so I'm going with "Practicur."

I thoroughly lament and note the news

One thing I want to point out here, because it's relevant to our argument, is that what you've translated "note" is "sehe mit betrübnis".

cahn, that's not as neutral as "note", it's "note with dismay." Leining is saying he's very unhappy about this news. Now, hypothetically there could be a cover-up, or this could be like the time I told a professor I was too busy to take his class and was sorry I would have to drop it partway through the term, when what I really meant was, "We both know after our last encounter that I think you're a bleeding incompetent and a bully and should be fired, but my department head said I had to phrase it this way, which I agreed to because dropping your class means I never have to ~~teach your class~~ interact with you again." So it's not *necessarily* that we can take Leining's dismay at face value. But I suspect the strongest evidence is yet to come: why would Fritz authorize Leining to allow Fredersdorf to investigate embezzlement if he himself had been convicted of embezzlement?

Wegfraß is just WRONG, and we're going to prove it. :P

Okay, off to decipher more and further the cause! Stay tuned!

Edited Date: 2023-04-14 03:49 pm (UTC)