10 Tuesday Apr 2018
Posted in Events
Heute vor 277 Jahren fand die Schlacht bei Mollwitz statt.
Die Schlacht war eine der denkwürdigsten des Jahrhunderts, weil hier zwei kleine Heere das Schicksal von Schlesien entschieden, und weil die Truppen des Königs sich dabei einen Ruhm erwarben, den weder Zeit noch Neid ihnen entreißen können.
— Ausgewählte Werke Friedrichs des Großen, Erster Band.
24 Wednesday Jan 2018
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06 Monday Nov 2017
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Heute vor 287 (1730) Jahren wurde Hans Hermann von Katte im Festung Küstrin enthauptet.
The court martial judgement makes for interesting reading, the silly sod nearly got away with his life. I feel sorry for his father.
27 Friday Oct 2017
16 Monday Oct 2017
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Today is the 260th anniversary of the Berliner Husarenstreich in 1757, when Austro-Hungarian forces briefly occupied Berlin whilst Frederick the Great was licking his wounds after the battle of Kolin (Kerle, wollt ihr ewig leben?).
It seems a little surreal that they were paid a ransom (gloves for the empress?) and then disappeared before the cavalry (excuse the pun) turned up. In our much more enlightened times they would have declared the Prussians to be irredeemably evil and demolished the city, as it was the Austrians suffered only 10 dead, the Prussians a few more.
In celebration I watched Husaren in Berlin, an amusing enough film but far from a documentary.
31 Thursday Aug 2017
Purely by coincidence I just started reading about the Battle of Mollwitz in “Ausgewählte Werke Friedrichs des Großen“, Erster Band, on the same day that I was repairing one of my editions of Thomas Carlyle’s History of Frederick the Great ready for rebinding and came across the following map. So I scanned it before it all goes back together.
12 Saturday Aug 2017
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fritz, german, geschichte, heroes, history, hohenzollern, prussia, schlacht
Today is the 258th anniversary of the battle of Kunersdorf, not Frederick the Great’s greatest moment. The king himself lost 3 horses, 1 shot from under him, and was saved from a musket ball by the snuff box in his coat pocket, after the battle he said:
It is a cruel failure that I will not survive. The consequences of the battle will be worse than the battle itself. I do not have any more resources, and—frankly confessed—I believe that everything is lost. I will not survive the doom of my fatherland. Farewell forever!
The battle itself is covered in far more detail than I can manage here and here, amongst other places.
As the date happens to fall on my birthday I treated myself to a small book: Die Schlacht von Kunersdorf by von Eberhardt from 1903, which contains some good sketches and a map of the battle.
13 Thursday Jul 2017
Posted in Books
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Books, fritz, german, geschichte, history, hohenzollern, prussia
A cutting from a magazine, 1950’s maybe?, found in “Ausgewählte Werke Friedrichs des Großen”, Erster Band.
13 Thursday Jul 2017
Marwitz with regards to the standard of military commanders of the time, and von Blücher, in 1807 (Nachlasse 1, seite 247):
Dies ist auch eine von den großen Kriegernaturen, die durch die Zeitumstände zu Grunde gingen. Was würde Friedrich der Zweite in seinen jüngeren Jahren aus Männern, wie der Herzog von Braunschweig, Hohenlohe, Rüchel, und auch aus Schmettau, Prinz von Oranien (König Wilhelm I. der Niederlande) und L’estocq gemacht haben? Nur Blücher ist es gewesen, der sich seinen eigenen Weg gemacht hat.
24 Friday Mar 2017
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This time from Friedrich von der Marwitz’s Lebensbeschreibung.
Von der Marwitz tells us that whilst travelling Frederick the Great liked to stay with local preachers, mainly because there was a bit less fuss than staying in the towns themselves. For this he always paid 50 Thalers for a midday stop and 100 Thalers for an overnight stay, plus expenses. A reasonable sum.
Apparently his long-time trusty coachman Pfund (you can still see him driving the chariot on top of the Kutschpferdestall in Potsdam) used this as an excuse to extort 10 Thalers from the relevant preachers beforehand, as a guarantee that the King would indeed stop with them.
Unfortunately in 1782 or 1783, as the young von der Marwitz met the king, the recently installed preacher in Dolgelin was unaware of this practice and failed to cough up, so Pfund thrashed the horses so as to get to the nearby town of Müncheberg where he could collect.
I wonder if Fritz knew…
Interestingly this story doesn’t tie in with the dates of Pfund’s service given in Wikipedia, which state that he retired in 1776. A mistake in von der Marwitz’s recollection or with Wikipedia’s sources?
