cahn: (Default)
[personal profile] cahn
Unfortunately, there was then at Berlin a King who pursued one policy only, who deceived his enemies, but not his servants, and who lied without scruple, but never without necessity.

(from The King's Secret - by Duke de Broglie, grand-nephew of the subject of the book, Comte de Broglie, and grandfather of the physicist) )
selenak: (Wilhelmine)
From: [personal profile] selenak
Okay, belated reaction: excellent detective work, as always. Yes, it's curious Luh ignored English and French bibliography, and good point about the alliterative elegance of the quote in French vs the somewhat clumsy sounding German version. Brilliant point about Carlyle's LACK of including it and the significance of same.

Also:

it's hard to pack something as topical as a quote about the First Partition of Poland into the Seven Years' War and fool anyone.

This cracked me up. :) Now I'm envisioning Catt including a passage where he has Fritz say that you know, him and MT are at war NOW, but in a few years, he prophecies they will divide Poland between them, and then she'll try but she'll take!

The Catherine novel/biography translated into German: you can send it to me, by all means, but I can't promise I'll read it within the next few weeks. (Also, since I'm back in Munich, my address there applies.)

In conclusion: "She cried but she took" is the "Let them eat cake!" of supposed Frederician sayings on an international basis, clearly.
mildred_of_midgard: (Default)
From: [personal profile] mildred_of_midgard
Yes, it's curious Luh ignored English and French bibliography

I am especially confused why he ignored the fact that the memoirs were written in French and went straight to talking about "sie weinte und griff dabei immer zu," and also why he used Brendan Simms' book as his example of modern German historiography, without even wasting a thought on the fact that it was written in English.

Now I'm envisioning Catt including a passage where he has Fritz say that you know, him and MT are at war NOW, but in a few years, he prophecies they will divide Poland between them, and then she'll try but she'll take!

Lol!

The Catherine novel/biography translated into German: you can send it to me, by all means, but I can't promise I'll read it within the next few weeks.

Oh, I don't care if you *read* it! If I wanted you to read it, I would just drop the public domain English translation pdf into the Frederician library and link you. All I want to know from the German copy I'm sending you is how the German translator rendered "Elle pleure et prend toujours." And I care about that because not only is Luh missing English and French historiography, he's also missing out on cases where this line appeared in German works before 1928 because they were translated from works in other languages. (Other languages, Luh: they exist. I was chortling because the very day I posted this comment, you wrote in a post in your blog, "because this is an English article, and thus German language works do not exist." I almost replied, "Like Jürgen Luh, but in reverse!")

Anyway, if you want to read it and have time, feel free; Horowski includes it in his bibliography, so it might be worth reading. But all I need from you is to look up this one line and tell me how it goes in German.

In conclusion: "She cried but she took" is the "Let them eat cake!" of supposed Frederician sayings on an international basis, clearly.

I'm really curious how common it is in Polish historiography, but alas, I cannot read Polish. And the one author I know would be the place to start, Konopczyński, wrote too late to be public domain.

Oh, interesting, *one* of his relevant books is online, his The History of Modern Poland, 1936. Let me see.

spory ojej zastosowanie w praktyce trwały jeszcze pól roku, albowem cesarzowakrólowa, wśród łez i narzekań na ten traktat, "taki nierówny, taki niesłuszny", zagarniała najwięcej ludzi i ziemi.

Disputes about its practical application lasted another half a year, because the empress-queen, amid tears and complaints about this treaty, "so unequal, so unfair", seized most of the people and land.

Okay, not quoting Fritz, but definitely based in the same tradition! I wish I could check Konopczyński's Frederick the Great and Poland, or his The Bar Confederation, or his The First Partition of Poland.
Edited Date: 2023-10-11 12:16 am (UTC)
mildred_of_midgard: (Default)
From: [personal profile] mildred_of_midgard
In other news, Royal Patron and I had a Zoom call tonight in which he held up the Catherine bio to the webcam and turned the pages on demand (he does not read German), and I discovered that the German edition is abridged and "She cried and always took" did not make the cut! (The English edition is unabridged.)

So when you're back in Munich and check your copy, Selena, if you just want to look at page 247 and see if it contains "Sie läßt Knute und Stock gelten..." with the ellipsis at the end, then you have the same edition (there were apparently at least three editions of the French, I discovered tonight) as Royal Patron's library copy, and there is no need for you to do anything further with this book, unless you want to read it for your own sake.

Royal Patron was also nice enough to scan me a 1933 dissertation entitled "Russland und Schweden*: 1762-1772" which cannot be obtained for any price online, so that should be useful for my 1768-1772 (which is increasingly 1764-1772, because you need the lead-up for context) research as well! He is truly a most generous patron (with access to the UCLA library).

* You see where my inability to type "Sweden" on the first try comes from. ;)
selenak: (Default)
From: [personal profile] selenak
The book arrived yesterday and I had a very quick look in between packing suitcases, and couldn‘t find anything. That explains it. I‘ll look again when I get back on the weekend.
mildred_of_midgard: (Default)
From: [personal profile] mildred_of_midgard
Aha. Yeah, I didn't want you to spend too much time looking for something that wasn't there. (It's a good thing RP and I ended up doing this by Zoom, because the timing accidentally worked out, as he was originally supposed to look for the quote on his own using the clues I'd given him, and it would have been much harder for him to figure out that he wasn't doing it wrong, it wasn't actually there!)

So interestingly, this book *would* not have been an early example of the quote in German, though it is in French and English historiography.
mildred_of_midgard: (Default)
From: [personal profile] mildred_of_midgard
Aha. Yeah, I didn't want you to spend too much time looking for something that wasn't there. (It's a good thing RP and I ended up doing this by Zoom, because the timing accidentally worked out, as he was originally supposed to look for the quote on his own using the clues I'd given him, and it would have been much harder for him to figure out that he wasn't doing it wrong, it wasn't actually there!)

So interestingly, this book *would* not have been an early example of the quote in German, as I'd originally thought, though it is still a (very) early example in French and English historiography.

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