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

You're viewing

cahn's journal
Create a Dreamwidth Account Learn More

Reload page in style: site light

Not only are these posts still going, there is now (more) original research going on in them deciphering and translating letters in archives that apparently no one has bothered to look at before?? (Which has now conclusively exonerated Fritz's valet/chamberlain Fredersdorf from the charge that he was dismissed because of financial irregularities and died shortly thereafter "ashamed of his lost honor," as Wikipedia would have it. I'M JUST SAYING.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

cahn

;an early taste for "sensual indulgence" which Seydlitz never lost and which eventually killed him

Well! Like you say... that's an impressively vague-but-technically-correct synonym for "died of syphilis"!

Varnhagen: Reads novel and realizes it ahistorically has Rahel in love with Louis Ferdinand
Varnhagen: OMG!

LOLOLOLOL I can totally see Varnhagen objecting from the historian side! Though it's got to be especially weird when it's actually your own wife. I think if someone wrote RPF about my spouse and that RPF was actually incorrect, I'd be pretty freaked out.

Conclusion: on one hand, it's just a novel. On the other hand, also kind of weird! I understand both their POVs here :)

From:

selenak

To be fair, if someone wrote correct RPF about my spouse, I would find that difficult to take as well. But yeah. Again, Varnhagen - who was considerably younger than Rahel and fell in love and married her anyway - hadn't known her at the time the novel is set, but he was correctly sure she had not been in love with Louis Ferdinand.

Fanny: But your wife is the most interesting woman in that time set! She had to be my female main character! Louis' earlier main mistress Henriette Fromm is a drippy dull Zimperliese, and Pauline Wiesel with her sex life can't possibly be the heroine for my mid 19th century readership, not to mention that I don't find her as fascinating as your wife anyway! Also, having Rahel in unrequited love with Louis Ferdinand gives me the opportunity to VENT about how men look for "childlike" adoring women first, then get bored and blame the women, while all the the time overlooking the brilliant female writer who'd have been their true partner in life!

Varnhagen: Being a man who totally went for the brilliant female writer, I resent that generalisation. Also: Rahel would NOT have fallen for freaking Louis Ferdinand. If anyone, I always had my suspicions about her/Pauline.

Fanny: Did I mention I have to sell this novel to a mid 19th century audience and that I want to VENT?

Selena, reading: Meanwhile, I'm distracted by other issues. I get why you're called the German George Sand, but Fanny, your description "like all the Hohenzollern, he was tall and slim" made me snort. I mean. FW? Fritz? And okay, Heinrich was slim, but TALL?

Fanny: I use that description in the first encounter of Louis with his cousin FW3. Both of whom look fit and slim in their portraits.

Selena: You've let Louis Ferdinand describe himself as a descendant of Fritz der Einzige König twice already. He's got even less an excuse for this than bloody Wilhelm II a century later. Louis would happen to know he was Fritz' nephew. The whole reason why they called him Louis Ferdinand was because he was Louis, son of Ferdinand, the littlest brother of Fritz. Fritz HAD NO DESCENDANTS!

Fanny: I know that. But many of my readers are into Der Einzige and the closer I can tie him to Louis Ferdinand, the better.