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oldfritz · 3 years

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I'm genuinely curious and don't want to start something! Just wanted to ask what you make of the 'Old Fritz might've been asexual' take, I don't know much about him and I feel you're one of the best people to ask esp since you lean towards 'he was probably queer in some way' too

Hey there! So, first off, don’t ever worry about me interpreting you asking me a question as starting something. As much as I love making dumb jokes about the guy, I love nothing more than doing this kind of stuff and defending or explaining my points. There’s two degrees I want to get over the next decade: first my JD and then my MA in Prussian history. I live for this stuff! Always have! Second off, I’m very sorry for not getting to this sooner. Things have been incredibly stressful for me for a variety of different reasons which have made answering your question, until now, rather difficult. Putting this under a cut because, holy shit, it got long!

My personal reasoning for why I think he’s bi (which, correct me if I’m wrong, I’m assuming is what you meant instead of ace and could be a different post entirely since some historians have tried to argue that) stems more to do with some of my lingering questions about the nature of his relationships with certain woman, rather than that of his relationships with men. To me and my modern, queer eye, Fritz’s relationships with men like Hans Hermann von Katte, Francisco Algarotti, Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf, and (much to my personal vexation) one Monsieur Voltaire are either outright homosexual/homoerotic in nature or very, very easily lend themselves to that interpretation rather than strictly romantic friendships (which Wikipedia does a fairly good overview of and, if you’re coming to me from AmRev perspective, uses Hamilton and Laurens’ relationship as a familiar example). While I’m avoiding those relationships in this ask, I’d be more than happy to elaborate upon one/all of them in a different one.

Before I go into the big pauses that Fritz’s relationships with Madame von Wreech and Countess Orzelska give me, I want to deny the use of Fritz’s wife as an example of Fritz’s attraction to woman. While this, admittedly, may sound odd, we have ample evidence of how turned off and repulsed Fritz found Elisabeth Christine. Before he had even met her, Fritz was complaining about how she was ‘not very pretty, speaks but little, and acts like a blockhead’ (Asprey, 87) and, later, admitted to Grumbkow his plan to ‘keep my word,...get married, but afterwards it will be a case of that is that, and goodbye, Madame, and fare thee well’ (Jones, 52). For Christ’s sake, the man pitied her knowing how his treatment would leave her as ‘one more unhappy princess in the world’! Which is little consolation when you remember he also referred to her with such romantic terms as ‘this unpleasant creature,’ ‘the abominable object of my desires,’ ‘the person,’ and claimed to have preferred to marry ‘the biggest whore in Berlin’ (Asprey, 87). And while we (fortunately? unfortunately?) know quite a bit about their sex life, Fritz largely regarded it as just another duty - to quote him, ‘I will only have the duty to fuck’ (Ibid, 87). And while Seckendorf heard - first, presumably from Count von der Schulenburg and, later on, Count Friedrich von Wartensleben, a close and intimate friend of the then-crown prince - that Fritz would ‘fuck and refuck’ Elisabeth Christine and that said act occurred in the afternoon, it still was out of a sense of obligation (Bely, 481-2). When reminded that if he wanted more money for frivolities, he’d need to produce an heir, Fritz bemoaned that he ‘cannot sleep with my wife out of desire, and when I do sleep with her, I do it out of duty rather than inclination’ (Clark, 50). All this in accumulation, as well as the myriad of other quotes and incidents I’ve left out, makes one wonder why his relationship with Elisabeth Christine is sometimes used by historians to prove any sort of heterosexual impulse in the man when she’s the woman with the weakest supports for that argument.

That being said, now we get to the women with a more muddled places in his romantic escapades, if you will. What exactly happened between Orzelska and Fritz during his trip with his father to Dresden in 1728? The main source for everything that occurred during this trip is Wilhelmina, who didn’t attend and without anything about this specific incident coming from Fritz or Friedrich Wilhelm I, make it rather hard to use as concrete, irrefutable proof. Now, if her recollections were contemporaneous - like coming from a diary or journal she kept at the time - that would be one thing. But it comes from her memoirs which, while a delightful read 10/10 recommend, are written decades after this trip took place and, memory being a finicky thing, can’t be taken to the bank. All those disclaimers, here’s the story as told by her:

‘One evening...,the King of Poland [note: Augustus II] insensibly led the King of Prussia to a very richly decorated room...The King of Prussia, delighted with what he saw, stopped to contemplate all its beauties, when [all of] a sudden a tapestry was rolled up, which procured him a very novel sight. It was a lovely female in a state of nudity [note: Countess Orzelska, the Polish king’s daughter], carelessly reclined on a couch. Her beauty excelled that of the finest pictures of Venus and the Graces; her body seemed of ivory, whiter than snow, and better shaped than that of the Venus de Medicis at Florence.

...Scarcely had the King cast his eyes on the fair one, than he turned about with indignation; and seeing my brother behind him, he rudely pushed him out of the room, and left it immediately after in a violent irritation against the trickery they had attempted to practice on him. ...In spite of the King’s vigilance, [Frederick] had had time to contemplate the Venus of the closet, who did not cause him so much horror as she had done to his father. (Wilhelmina’s Memoirs, vol. 1, 107-6)

Wilhelmina then goes on to claim Fritz had fallen ‘passionately in love’ with Orzelska and that the illness Fritz experienced upon returning home was simply being lovesick. Pinning the accuracy of this story is incredibly difficult because, again, we have only one source relayed decades after the fact and from two volumes of memoirs known to have inaccuracies. While I, personally, would love if he had had a tryst with Orzelska (who is such a badass in her own right and deserves more recognition than as a footnote in this guy’s story), there’s no one way to say with more than 30% confidence. I am inclined to believe something along these lines happened because if someone told me a story like this, lord knows I wouldn’t forget it for the rest of my life. And, with Wilhelmina being so close with her brother, it lends a bit more credence but as to the actual emotional or physical response Fritz had to it, well, without my time machine, I can’t and don’t want to say.

With Madame Eleonore-Louise von Wreech, things are a little more concrete. For starters, Fritz actually talked about her! In written correspondence that survived! We even have seven letters between the two of them that survived, which is a bigger win! As Blanning says, they’re ‘ardent but light in tone, ironic, almost flippant, and highly stylized’ (Blanning, 58). Their relationship was known to those close with Fritz at the time that Schulenberg felt compelled to visit and warn the crown prince against devoting himself to women because ‘the slight pleasures gained cause a million displeasures.’ Fritz’s response? To tell the poor guy that he may have ‘the gift of continence, but I assure you that I do not’ (Asprey, 83-4). Firtz even went so far as to send a letter to her mother, waxing poetic about Louise’s ‘beauty, her majestic air, her bearing, and her entire department.’ It’s worth noting that Louise eventually broke off the affair due to being bored by how he ‘loved [her] too much and often annoyed [her] with his clumsy love’ (Ibid, 84). Contemporaries, including Friedrich Wilhelm, believed Fritz had impregnated her with a daughter who her ‘cuckolded husband would refuse to recognize’ (Blanning, 58). Blanning is the only source I’ve seen dispute this due to this news coming from Seckendorf, who didn’t reveal how he came about this information; that Fritz and Madame von Wreech’s correspondence doesn’t indicate a physical relationship; and on the fact that she was not pregnant. I haven’t been able to find the birth dates or any sort of records for Louise’s two daughters to figure out where their conception could’ve been in the timeline and if it matches with the likely dates for the affair, but I also don’t have the resources Cambridge would afford Blanning. Either way, while the physical nature of the affair is in dispute, the emotional aspect certainly was there. Especially when taking into consideration the fact that she’s the woman Fritz was likely referring to in the 16 August 1737 letter to Voltaire where he claimed she had taught him how to love (and also inspired him to write poetry, which we shouldn’t be thankful for). Specifically, all these years later, he stated how ‘this little miracle of nature possessed every possible charm, together with good taste and delicacy. She sought to transfer these qualities to me. I succeeded well in love but poorly in poetry. Since that time I have very often been in love and have always been a poet’ (Fritz’s Oeuvres, vol. 21, 96).

All this to say, there’s a bit too much evidence of some degree of opposite-gender attraction in Fritz to completely write off the possibility that he could’ve been bisexual. While it’s undeniable he held a preference for men and that’s whose company he typically enjoyed, I still do find it interesting the two exceptions (one potential and the other with a fair degree of certainty) to this. And, while I would never want his attraction to men be minimized in favor of that to women, it still remains important to note to get the most comprehensive picture of the man.

#frederick the great #elisabeth christine #countess orzelska #madame von wreech #asks #anonymous

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widvile-blog · 6 years

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Anna Karolina Orzelska, Princess of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Beck (23 November 1707 - 27 September 1769)

#anna karolina orzelska #princess of schleswig-holstein-sonderburg-beck #countess orzelska #daughter of augustus ii of poland #wife of charles louis duke of schleswig-holstein-sonderburg-beck #history #women in history #18th century #art

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tabellae-rex-in-sui · 3 years

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Okay so @modoru-mono brought it to my attention that the English translation of Franz Kugler's Geschichte Friedrichs des Großen that I own is based on a later edition than the German edition digitized by Trier University which means it has a couple different Menzel engravings than the ones we all know and love!

So, for convenience, I cross referenced my copy and the Trier digitization and scanned the new images. Enjoy!

Opening credits:

My copy actually doesn't have any of the illustrations shown on the Trier scan, instead it has these two (which aren't in the Trier scan):

Chapter IV: Disunion between Father and Son:

Two new engravings for this chapter!

Countess Orzelska leading Fritz out of the dance hall at the Dresden Carnival. Placed between p. 34, fig. 2 and p. 38, fig. 1

Augustus the Strong presenting a nude woman to Friedrich Wilhelm and Fritz. Placed a page after the one with Orzelska but before p. 38, fig. 1

Chapter XI: Residence in Rheinsberg:

This one's weird. Technically there's no new engravings with new subject matter, just an updated version of the same engraving. The Trier version is on the left while my book's engraving is on the right:

It's a hand holding Fritz's Anti-Machiavel up to a bust of Machiavelli. Wonder why it's different...

Chapter XV: Campaign of the Year 1741

Two for this chapter

We have the first of a couple of atmospheric engravings added into this edition. The accompanying text on this page is about March-April during the 1741 campaigns to capture fortresses in Silesia and the heavy snow that fell that spring. This one's between p. 163, fig. 2 and p. 165, fig. 1

Next is this one! Prussian-Austrian negotiations ended the first Silesian war with Austria conceding Lower Silesia to Prussia. The engraving shows the Prussian celebration for this victory, the phrase "Suum Cuique" (roughly "to each his own") being the motto of the Prussian Order of the Black Eagle. This one's that last engraving of the chapter, after p. 154, fig. 1 but before the next chapter.

Chapter XIX: Campaign of the Year 1745

This one only has one.

Another atmospheric one. It's the final image in the chapter, showing the mountains Frederick and his army marched through to get to Silesia after their victory at the battle of Soor. Again, it's the very last image in this chapter, right after p. 191, fig. 1 and all the text, right before the next chapter.

Chapter XXVIII: Conclusion of the Campaign of 1757. Leuthen

Last one!

Aaand another atmosphere one! This one's from the Battle of Leuthen, depicting the dense fog over the battlefield. This is between p. 300, fig. 1 and p. 302, fig. 1

And that's it! The rest of the engravings are the same as the Trier University digitization!

#well that was fun!#the Dresden ones are so cool #i haven't been able to find other scans of them online #hopefully you guys get a kick out of this as much as i did!#the Orzelska one nsbskxnskas im obsessed #frederick the great

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soliloquyinthedark · 4 years

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“Portrait of Countess Anna Karolina Orzelska” (1730s) by Rosalba Carriera (Venetian, 1675-1757)

#Rosalba Carriera #Anna Karolina Orzelska #Poland #Polish #Slavic #art

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margridarnauds · 5 years

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6, 12, 23, and 45 please!

Thank you!

6. List your OTP from each fandom you’ve been involved in.

So, I have no idea what we’re talking about as far as levels of involvement, but here are the ones I read fanfic RELIGIOUSLY for back in the day. So, behold my shame.

Cats (oh, my sweet, innocent 12 year old self) - Mistoffelees/Victoria.

Phantom of the Opera - Raoul/Christine/Erik, tbh. I started off E/C, then shifted to R/C when I realized E was a trashfire, then went to R/C/E when I realized that I loved garbage after all.

Van Helsing - Anna/Dracula. Which is impressive given I’ve never. Actually. Watched it. Sue me.

Carmilla - Carmilla/Laura.

The Pirate Queen - Graínne/Donal, one of the first fics I ever wrote. (And then never published.) Yes, he is a garbage fire in the musical, but in my very specific rewrite of it, he wasn’t. Though these days, I kind of lean towards Tiernan/Donal or Tiernan/Gráinne/Donal. Garbage pirate OT3 is garbage.

Dracula - The Countess (from Makt Myrkanna)/Lucy Westenra. The first explicit femslash I ever wrote, and it might very well never see the light of day because I do not forever want to be known as The One With The Blood And The Lesbians. Though, who knows? It might cleanse me of Printing Press.

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (Yes. Really.): Twilight/Princess Luna. I keep telling myself that my AO3 profile’s eventually going to be nothing but period dramas, my (1) Terra Nova fic, and…a My Little Pony fic, along with various Barbie Movie fics. For old time’s sake.

Terra Nova - Wash/Mira, due to @janetcarter‘s influence.

The Flash - Barrison. Specifically, Eobard/Barry. In many ways, it was my prep for 1789 with the whole “I murdered your parent” thing.

The Avengers - Loki/Tony Stark.

Les Miserables - Valjean/Javert

The Golden Compass - Mrs. Coulter/Lord Asriel

Arthuriana - Galahad/Mordred

Star Wars - Reylo or Finnlo. I don’t particularly have a preference, just let Kylo screw one of his various archnemeses straight to the side of the Light.

Star Wars: Rebels - Kallus/Zeb. Oh. Another enemies to lovers ship. Who would have guessed?

1789 - Peyrol/Ronan (Was there any doubt? If there was, I need to write more.)

Revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre - Madame Roland/Marie-Anne. In progress, but A Ship for me. Mainly because I’m a contrarian little shit who writes things when people tell me I can’t and then gets attached to the result.

Brennus, Enemy of Rome - Ahmet/Nissia. Which…I still need to. Write. My fanfic for that one. So that fanfic for it exists.

Lord of the Rings - Boromir/Aragorn

Friedrich: Mythos und Tragödie - Countess Orzelska/Wilhelmine and Fritz/Katte. Pretty much equally, though Orzelskine (?) Wilhelska (?) is starting to edge out Fratte.

La Legende du Roi Arthur - Leia/Guinevere in the French and Morgane/Guin in the Takarazuka.

Irish Mythology - Bres/Sreng. I will defend this one to the death and I will do it with citations and footnotes.

Scarecrow of Romney Marsh - General Pugh/Dr Syn. Yet another one I. Need to write the fic for.

Star Trek: ……..

………You know, my favorite thing about Star Trek is that, regardless of shipping preferences, we can all find something to enjoy. Kor/Kirk. While I can’t speak for DS9 Quark/Brunt, my current favorite from Discovery has to be Michael/Tilly, which might very well be the single most wholesome thing I’ve shipped in a very long time.

Ace Attorney: Phoenix/Edgeworth.

12. Who is your current OT3?

Chauvelin/Percy/Marguerite from The Scarlet Pimpernel. I do not accept constructive criticism on this one. Because Percy/Marguerite are sickeningly sweet on their own, Marguerite/Chauvelin has That Sexual Tension in Where’s the Girl and The Riddle, and Percy/Chauvelin fulfill all my requirements as far as enemies to lovers ships are concerned.

23. Name a fic you’ve written that you’re especially fond of & explain why you like it.

I’ve talked a lot about Forgiveness being one of the very few things I’ve written that I’ve ever liked and the ONE thing that I feel…gets my idea of how L/R WORK together and probably shows off my style best, along with Fowl Play (WHICH HAS FANART NOW. WHICH I’M STILL NOT OVER BECAUSE MY BABY HAS FANART.) So, instead, I’m going to shift to Pour la Peine, which…is my messy, messy child in many regards, not the least because it’s so much longer + still isn’t finished.

(Warning for various and assorted personal, squishy feelings, as well as cancer mentions)

When I first got the prompt from @fallenidol-453, it was January of 2018. Two months before, I’d received the news that my uncle had Stage Four Esophageal Cancer and my mother had moved from our house to his house to care for him, leaving me without her help for the first time in my life, which I deliberately kept as low-key about on here as I could be, given that, to be honest, dealing with the endless “I’m so sorry to hear that”s gets very exhausting after awhile and I was a college student with a schedule to keep. And he and I had a very…contentious relationship, despite the two of us being alike in many ways. Possibly because we were alike in many ways. And, by May of that year, he was dead. And I would learn shortly afterwards that my paternal grandfather had died in January, but no one on my father’s side had bothered to tell me. I spent a lot of time trying to deal with the stress of that time, juggling that with my schoolwork and my fanfic, which I tried to work on from the time I received the prompt onwards. (Tbh, I’d had the opening scene in my mind for awhile before, but I hadn’t had a larger plot + ending until the prompt.)

At first, I thought that I would publish it like I’d later publish Forgiveness, in one straight chapter, but as time went on and on and there became less and less of a shot of having it done any time soon, I ended up just publishing the first chapter and deciding to update it from there. And that chapter got a lot of ribbing from friends. “Her brother is dead” really came off as a very melodramatic first line, but I also decided, very early on, that I didn’t care about what the objective quality of it was; all I cared about was creating a snapshot of a time in my life, just like when I go through the stuff that I made when I was twelve and I laugh about the various and assorted OCs and questionable phrases but love them all the same because they’re my twelve year old self’s. And, where I was at that point in my life, writing Solène mourning a family member who she had a difficult relationship with while I mourned a family member who I had a difficult relationship with, it was the only line that felt right to me.

There’s a lot of things with this one that I’m still not sure about. There’s a plot twist that I’ve tried to be quiet about for all this time (that I’ve probably been really terrible about keeping, tbh) and that is either going to be the Jumping the Shark moment or the defining moment of it, and I’m obviously not sure how that’s going to be received though I want to believe I’ve foreshadowed it enough to not make it too much of a swerve, I’m not sure how I feel about the ending, there’s a lot there that’s murky and probably more reflective of my writing a year ago than not, and I’m not sure about how I’ve handled the character dynamics given what we’ve got in canon or the dynamic I’ve put them into, or whether the choices they’ll make reflect THEM or what I WANTED them to do. Hell, with a few things, I’m not sure how I’m even going to GET to the ending.

But, I’m really proud of how much I’ve had the chance to work with Solène and Olympe, I’m really happy with a lot of the work I put into sequences like the two chapters long March to Versailles, which involved looking into a LOT of personal accounts as well as secondary sources analyzing it, and I liked trying to flesh out Solène’s world. But, more importantly, of everything I’ve written, it and Le Cri are probably the most directly personal to me, and even though a part of me still says Her brother is dead is a hell of a melodramatic opening line, it fulfilled its purpose. And, tbh, sometimes that’s all a fic needs.

45. What is your all time favourite fanfic?

This is so hard for me, because there are so many fics that have left a huge impression on me throughout the various fandoms I’ve been in. In 1789 alone, I was thinking of at least two different fics at a given point, which is both fantastic and minorly stressful given how small this fandom is (one of which, incidentally, was Little Dove Heart, since that really gave me a huge push as far as Laz and his backstory and his characterization and his relationship to Artois, even if I tend to keep the latter more in the background). And there have been so many fics I’ve read that I’ll remember and go back to periodically, and that really helped me as far as looking at how character voices could be developed and how description would work and how to work a time period and a setting into a story.

Overall though, I think I’m going to have to give it to Vae Victis, which is a work by @sineala‘s. I’ve never been quiet about my undying love for the Gauls and for Brennus in particular. Brennus is one of my historical favs, and I felt like this fic did a really, really fantastic job of bringing that much-neglected period of time to life and developing the characters on their own, without me having any background in the source material. With fanfic, especially with a more active fandom, there’s kind of an expectation that everyone knows the characters involved, so to be able to work in a different time and to get the reader fully invested in the characters and their relationship in their own right is a really fantastic accomplishment, and to be able to show the Gauls and Brennus (in what little time he gets, because my boi’s not the focus and I accept that) as three dimensional figures rather than a rampaging horde is always much appreciated. And it has a WORKS CITED page at the end, AKA the eternal key to my heart.

#long post #berncat #sorry for the tragic backstory dump on PLP!#but there's a reason why it's still my baby despite everything

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