I'm currently reading up on a bunch of 19th century female writers/feminists/revolutionaries, and one of them, Fanny Lewald, happens to have written a novel about Louis Ferdinand, Heinrich's favourite nephew, who was famous for a) his love affairs, b) dying young on the battlefield against Napoleon as the sole Hohenzollern military hero of his generation. Now Fanny Lewald otherwise is actually an endearingly sharp-tongued realistic person; I've read her memoirs, and also her series of articles about all women (not just the daughters of rich families able and willing to hire a private tutor) deserving proper school education, or the articles detailing the abysmal underpaid overworked situation of working class women. But wouldn't you know it, the Louis Ferdinand novel starts out with a chapter explaining/apologizing for the characters all still having been formed by the 18th century in their selfish me-and-my-love-affairs (instead of freedom-of-the-fatherland and me) attitudes and basic amorality about extramarital goings on, all the fault of, who else, FW2's era for FW2 in his weakness allowed the manly chasteness that prevailed when Fritz was King to be replaced by Orgies Orgies Orgies (and religion, in all fairness, she's also critiszing that - Fanny Lewald was born Jewish, converted for the social pressure reasons of the time and was immediately sorry for it, deciding she didn't believe anything anymore, neither Christian nor Jewish religion). This immediately reminded me of Schmidt-Lötzen's original preface to Lehndorff's (first volume of) diaries where he mentions that the idea of manly chaste Prussians in the Fritzian era being replaced by a sex obsessed lot under FW2 will have to be revised on the evidence of said diaries.
...what I want to know: how did the 19th century popular historians* sell Seydlitz if they really wanted to believe everyone in the Fritz era had either marital sex or none at all? (And that's only on the het side of things.) And did they really imagine FW2 having mistresses did make that much difference so that everyone suddenly started to have extramarital sex?
*I make the qualification because clearly anyone like Preuss with actual access to the letters of Fritz & Co. must have been without that delusion.
And Fanny Lewald wasn't a prude. Her (successful) argument towards her father as to why she didn't want to have an arranged marriage was that she didn't see how this was better than prostitution - providing sex and housekeeping in return for being financed - and that in fact she thought prostitution was more honest. In her articles, she scoffs at the ridiculousness of expecting women to blush (or not look at all) when faced with Greek statues or a great deal of classic European art and wants to know whether men imagine children to be born clothed. But still: she starts a novel aimed at her 19th century contemporaries with that disclaimer/apology.
As to what Fritz would say when learning his era in the 19th century was basically sold as Sparta with more culture and less sex...
Return of the manly chaste Prussians
...what I want to know: how did the 19th century popular historians* sell Seydlitz if they really wanted to believe everyone in the Fritz era had either marital sex or none at all? (And that's only on the het side of things.) And did they really imagine FW2 having mistresses did make that much difference so that everyone suddenly started to have extramarital sex?
*I make the qualification because clearly anyone like Preuss with actual access to the letters of Fritz & Co. must have been without that delusion.
And Fanny Lewald wasn't a prude. Her (successful) argument towards her father as to why she didn't want to have an arranged marriage was that she didn't see how this was better than prostitution - providing sex and housekeeping in return for being financed - and that in fact she thought prostitution was more honest. In her articles, she scoffs at the ridiculousness of expecting women to blush (or not look at all) when faced with Greek statues or a great deal of classic European art and wants to know whether men imagine children to be born clothed. But still: she starts a novel aimed at her 19th century contemporaries with that disclaimer/apology.
As to what Fritz would say when learning his era in the 19th century was basically sold as Sparta with more culture and less sex...