cahn | Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 44

They're only 8 pages long, the handwriting is abysmal, and they're not in the section I expected (this one is titled "Instructions from Frederick the Great"), which is how I missed them the first time around, quickly flipping through ~1500 handwritten pages in languages I don't know very well. But they're here!

I was hoping for something worth publishing in a short book, like the Des Champs memoirs, whereas I doubt there's much not in these memoirs not already contained in Formey's eulogy, but at least we HAVE the memoirs now, so we'll find out!

...Once I decipher this handwriting, ugh. There's a lot of blotches and scribbling out, this is obviously a first draft, but I will do my best.

Stay tuned!

P.S. Now I have to delete the part of the essay that says they must have been lost, since Carl Ernst gets the sequence of events of the escape wrong. Well, one, these are so short I doubt much detail is included, and two, from what I was able to make out on the first page, Peter, writing 20 years later, has FW sending him to Wesel in mid-January 1729, so apparently his dates can't be trusted either. (Funny how he remembers what part of what month but not what year.)

P.P.S. Wow. Even at 8 pages, just to finally have these, this was worth the $745! (Though I'm still mourning the death of my hopes of being able to publish them as a book-length monograph, short memoirs are orders of magnitude better than forever lost memoirs!)

P.P.P.S. Selena, I'm going to be behind on comments for a while longer. Please forgive your royal decipherer, and keep your write-ups coming. I'm over here avidly reading and enjoying everything you write!

Edited 2023-06-21 18:41 (UTC)

Peter, writing 20 years later, has FW sending him to Wesel in mid-January 1729, so apparently his dates can't be trusted either. (Funny how he remembers what part of what month but not what year.)

Upon closer inspection, it says the month of January, not the middle of January. Still, you'd think 1730 would be a memorable year!

But not only does he say 1729 for the year of his being sent to Wesel, he says that in August of the same year, a tragic event concerning the prince royal happened.

Wow, turning the page, he says, "When I left Wesel in 1729..."

All right, then, Peter! Your dates are not to be trusted.

Also, skipping ahead and skimming as best I can with this ABOMINABLE handwriting (especially for someone not fluent in French), he def talks about his reunion with Fritz in 1740. As far as I can tell, Peter says he put way too much weight on his relationship with Crown Prince Fritz, didn't realize how much had changed, and lived to regret it. Which we knew, but I look forward to deciphering a more nuanced take on his opinion that I can pass on.

(I was hoping to find out which brother was not!Robert, but no luck so far, either in the skimming of the memoirs, or the genealogies I have gone through so far.)

First of all, CONGRATULATIONS! Between Peter's memoirs and the Fredersdorf addressed letters, you already found more primary source material since any Frederician researcher since Ziebura published the Marwitz letters, I dare say! This is awesome.

Secondly, lol about the year. Psychologically, it's very interesting that Peter's memory substitutes 1729 for 1730, and my kitchen psychology instinct guesses it might be because in terms of friendship with Fritz, 1729 was Peter's year, whereas 1730 obviously was Katte's?

(AW: You are all wrong. It was the year my brother Heinrich moved in with me.
Ferdinand: It was the year when I was born, but no one ever mentions that, do they? *eyes Wilhelmine for calling Heinrich her youngest brother in the description of FW's homecoming)

First of all, CONGRATULATIONS! Between Peter's memoirs and the Fredersdorf addressed letters, you already found more primary source material since any Frederician researcher since Ziebura published the Marwitz letters, I dare say! This is awesome.

It is awesome! As I said before, the way to do high-quality German historical research as an American amateur is to ask for lots and lots of favors. :D

Also, we have to give credit to Kloosterhuis. He was the director of the Prussian archives for decades, and he did turn up a *ton* of primary source material, far more than yours truly, and he cited it diligently. It's just that he did also miss some things that I'm catching.

Secondly, lol about the year. Psychologically, it's very interesting that Peter's memory substitutes 1729 for 1730, and my kitchen psychology instinct guesses it might be because in terms of friendship with Fritz, 1729 was Peter's year, whereas 1730 obviously was Katte's?

This makes perfect sense to me!

(AW: You are all wrong. It was the year my brother Heinrich moved in with me.

Exactly what I thought! As soon as I saw Peter had put 1729 instead of 1730, I thought of AW, and was like, "Does no one remember what happened that year??"

Spaen: I remembered! To quote Nicolai,

Frederick the Great had done nothing for Spaen after his ascension; but when he travelled to Kleve in the year 1763, he did take lodgings with General von Spaen, was very gracious and confidential towards him, reminded him of stories of their shared youth, but did not mention the year 1730 with one word; which is why General von Spaen used to joke that the King had an excellent memory right up to 1730.

Speaking of things I found that Kloosterhuis didn't, it has bugged me for years that he reports Peter and Ariane's marriage date as July 18, 1742, and then summarizes the 1820 letter from Karl Ernst to Rödenbeck by saying they got married in August 1742, without comment on the contradiction.

I originally figured the first one was more likely to be correct since it had a date, and thus Kloosterhuis was probably staring at it when he wrote it, whereas with the second one he might have been going from memory.

Then I realized the second one was just him summarizing what Karl Ernst said, and I figured since the first one had a documentary source and the second was a letter written almost a hundred years after the fact, that Kloosterhuis was correctly reporting both his sources, and it was Karl Ernst's memory that was faulty.

*Then* I started getting my hands on the actual archive documents Kloosterhuis cites, and I realized he was not citing a marriage record, as I expected, but just a genealogy that was obviously written many years after, and gets other dates wrong. *Then* I started thinking Karl Ernst might be a more reliable source after all! He knew his mother most of his life, and she might have mentioned it/gotten nostalgic/etc.

Yesterday, I realized that among the documents in my possession is what looks like a marriage contract between Peter and Ariane. It's 8 pages long, in bureaucratic German, and so I haven't read it yet, but it contains words like "Brautigam Herr Peter Christoph Carl", "Braut" and "Morgengabe", so I'm deducing a marriage contract.

Unfortunately, the first page or pages (I suspect 1 sheet of paper written on both sides) is missing! I confirmed with the archive that they do not have the missing page in their possession and that they digitized everything they had for me.

Fortunately, the final page is the one with the date, and it says "17 August", which means I think we have caught Kloosterhuis relying on another inaccurate source.

(I was shocked how many of Kloosterhuis' claims about the Keith family names, birth, and death dates came from these genealogies and not from, as I was assuming, official baptism, marriage, and burial records. Not that those are perfect, but at least if you have a book with a list of entries that are all from November 1764, and the previous section is October 1764 and the next two sections are December 1764 and January 1765, and you know they were entered as they happened, you can place a pretty high confidence in a belief that your event took place in November 1764, even if the details entered are wrong. (I say this because these genealogies have given me numerous years for Friedrich Ludwig's death ranging from 1762-1765, but his burial record is November 1764.))

Anyway, we have Peter's marriage contract, and it's on my list of documents to come back to! (A lot of what I'm doing is going through the 1500 pages making notes of which image numbers contain which information, and what I want to come back to later.

P.S. In all the documents I've found, Lower Saxon archives, Prussian archives, and church records, Ariane's name is spelled "Oriane/Oriana", and once "Origana." The only contemporary source I've seen spell it "Ariane" was Formey, which I originally went with because that was the first contemporary source I had that referred to her by first name at all! Plus that's how Kloosterhuis spelled it, so I figured that was what she used.

I now think "Oriane" is more accurate, but "Ariane" is embedded in my memory. I wrote fic using that name! So while I plan to update the spelling in my essay, she will remain Ariane for me in salon, so we don't all have to get used to a new spelling. (These people all had several spellings of their names anyway.)

Edited 2023-06-22 18:12 (UTC)

Speaking of names,

felis once reported from the Berlin address calendar that (Peter) Carl Ernst Reinhard was listed under two different names:

[1775-1776: Geheime Staatskanzlei + Royal Envoy at foreign courts: Peter Carl v. Keith, Legations-Rath, Königlicher Kammerherr and Envoyé Extraordinaire at the Turin Court, is absent [therefore no adress]]

1777/78: same as 1776

1779-83: listed in the Court section: Peter Carl v. Keith, lives "in der Breiten Strasse"
in the Geheime Staatskanzlei section: Ernst Reinhard Carl v. Keith, lives "in der Breiten Strasse im Dammschen Hause"

1784-87: Court section: Peter Carl v. Keith, "s. Geheime Staatskanzlei"
Geheime Staatskanzlei: Ernst Reinhard Carl v. Keith, "Taubenstraße im Friedelschen Hause"
+ 1787: Widow Keith mentioned for the first time

1788: the court mention finally changes from "Peter Carl" to "Ernst Reinhard Carl"

Having now been through a *lot* of correspondence, genealogies, and official documents, I can say that so far, I've only seen one "Peter Carl", and it's 1772. What's interesting is that it's an official form granting "Peter Carl" a post as royal chamberlain, and it's signed by Leining, and there is an exactly identical form granting "Carl Ernst" a different post, signed by Leining, dated 1765!

So I feel like possibly he started including Peter in his name in the 1770s, but had given it up by the time we start getting more documents in the 1790s and beyond.

There's also a catalogue entry in the Prussian archive for his correspondence as envoy to Turin starting in 1772 that lists his name as Peter Carl, but I have scans of the documents (of course I do), and I see no mention of any first names, so the archivists are probably going by some other document, possibly the one I found.

Taking a step out of the 18th century for a minute, some of you may remember that as I read along with the History of the Germans podcast, I've gotten to the Friedrich II "stupor mundi" episodes, and am reading along in biographies by Horst (recommended by Selena), Houben (recommended or at least referred to by Dirk the podcaster), and Rader (which I found on my own and read last year, but which Dirk also refers to often and which I am rereading, now with a better chance of remembering things).

Now, I remembered that a few months ago, Selena told us that "my fave's second name was Roger - Federico Ruggiero in Italian." And indeed, I find that Horst says that. In fact, he says that it's due to German nationalist historians preferring to drop the name "Roger" as part of a one-sided attempt to claim Friedrich as German, not Italian.

However, I find that Rader says "maybe" about "Roger" as a second name, and Houben says "maybe" with even more detailed source criticism. Houben:

We do not know when and where Friedrich was baptized. It can be assumed that this happened at the end of 1196, possibly under the double name Roger Friedrich, which would refer to his grandfathers, Roger II of Sicily and Frederick I Barbarossa. At least that's what one reads in the well-informed annals of Montecassino, and there is probably also a play on it by the poet Peter of Eboli (near Salerno), when, in a historical epic dedicated to Henry VI in the spring 1195, he wrote: “O welcome boy, epoch of the time of Renewal, from now on you will be Roger, from now on Friedrich" (O votive puer, renovandi temporis etas,/ Exhinc Rogerius, hinc Fredericus eris). In the majority of contemporary historians, however, the only name used is Friedrich, which is also the only one used in documents.

So it does not appear from this that modern nationalist historians are to blame.

In general, being partway through all three bios, I find that whenever Dirk, Rader (2010), and Houben (2008) are at pains to dismiss a legend by means of source criticism, such as the legend that young Friedrich roamed the streets and went hungry until the locals took turns feeding him for a week, Horst (1975) uncritically repeats the legends without any source analysis or skepticism.

I thought you might like to know this, Selena, since Friedrich's your fave.

(We were supposed to have this discussion way back in January when you were answering a question a day, and I picked "stupor mundi" as mine, but I fell behind on both the podcast and my German reading. Now I'm going to fall behind again, but I thought I'd get this result of last weekend's reading out there before I forget.)

(AW: You are all wrong. It was the year my brother Heinrich moved in with me.
Ferdinand: It was the year when I was born, but no one ever mentions that, do they? *eyes Wilhelmine for calling Heinrich her youngest brother in the description of FW's homecoming)

Heeee!
Sorry, Ferdinand!

\o/

Nice. :D

For what it's worth, I think remembering the month/season of an event correctly is much easier than the exact year, there's way more circumstantial memory to place things. Speaking of - is there a date saying when exactly he wrote these memoirs?

Season, yes, my first thought was that I bet he remembered traveling all the way across Germany in January! Month...well, I have more trouble telling January apart from February than I do 1999 from 2000.

Yes, there is a date! I was going to tell you about it, because it's an interesting and not at all surprising date: 1 June, 1752. It's almost 10 years after he married Ariane (August 1742), and he's just turned 41 years old (on May 24). So while middle-aged Fritz is taking up with shiny red ~~Porsches~~ chamber hussars, middle-aged Peter is looking back at his life, taking stock on it, and reflecting.

Congratulations! : D That must feel so awesome.

It does! *happy dance*

:DD Congratulations! :DD

Like

felis, it's sometimes easier for me to remember months (and even part of months) than years, although I don't think I'd be able to remember either with a whole lot of accuracy 20 years after the fact!

Would you remember the year you fled the country, running for your life, though? Any other event I would understand, like going to Lisbon, but that one surprises me!

Like if he just thought he'd been stationed in Wesel for 18 months instead of 6, that I would understand. Or maybe even if it was 1729 and he remembered it as 1730, which is a round number. But no, he thinks the great escape was 1729.

This is evidence he doesn't talk about it much with other people, I have to conclude. Which makes sense, he's extremely defensive about it in the memoirs, as you'll see once I'm done transcribing. I already suspected he didn't want to talk about it. But now I have evidence, because anyone he talked to would have said 1730--it wasn't just an event in his private life, it was international news!

Btw, amount of transcription done today: zero. I had plans, but possible middle-aged shippiness takes priority!

Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 44

I FOUND PETER'S MEMOIRS

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Peter and Ariane's marriage

Names: (Peter) Karl Ernst

Names: Federico (Ruggerio)

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