1740 and All That

Kloosterhuis reports that according to Danish ambassador Poul Vendelbo-Lövenörn, Katte broke down in tears when his death sentence was read to him. This contradicts Wilhelmine's account that he heard his sentence without changing color.

The citation for the claim was Stefan Hartmann, Beziehungen Preußens zu Dänemark von 1688 bis 1789.

selenak got a hold of this book and translated the relevant passage for us.

Background: relations are tense because FW suspects the Danes of conspiring with the Brits to put a British pawn on the Swedish throne.

The discovery of the escape plans of the Prussian Crown Prince in the beginning of August 1730, behind which King Friedrich Wilhelm suspected English scheming, heightened those tensions even more. The arrest of young Friedrich, his imprisonment in the fortress Küstrin and the death penalty for Lieutenant Katte were observed with great attention in Denmark. Crown Prince Friedrich had indeed confided his escape plans to the Danish envoy Lovenorn, but hadn't found agreement from the later. Lovenorn had done everything to dissuade the Prince from his intent hand had tried to influence Katte to the same purpose. His efforts remained unsuccessful. When the King learned of Lovenorn's entanglement in his son's plans, he felt betrayed by the envoy. The Prussian cabinent secretary von Borck had to write a letter to Lovenorn at (FW's) command in which it was said: "I had believed him (Lovenorn) to be my good friend, but not anymore since Katte and Fritz, c'est le Prince, have testified that he'd known what they had planed, and that the later had confided it to him at Prince Galitzin's party. If he as my friend had told me about it, this unfortunate affair would not have happened."'

(Source Footnote: The letter itself from the archive. Galitzin was Prince Sergey Dimitr. Galitzin, Russian envoy in Berlin 1729/1730.)

While Lovenorn could successfully convince the King of his innocence in later conversations, but due to the unpleasant situation at the Prussian court he was glad, when an order from Christian VI., who had ascended to the Danish throne in October 1730, commanded him back to Copenhagen.

Source Footnote: Letter dated September 10th, 1730.)

Legation secretary von Johnn was chosen as his successor, who was lower in rank than Lovenorn.

Footnote to this: "Rekreviditiv" - I have no idea how to translate this - by Lovenorn from December 26th, 1730. In his report from November 5th, 1730, Lovenorn describes that when the death sentence was read to him, Katte had lost all "contenance" and burst into tears.

End of footnote. And of text about the escape attempt, the next passage is about fishing disputes. There is nothing about the pamphlet, Lovenorn or Johnn as possible sources, or Lovenorn having had a good relationship with Fritz before. I'll read the entire book, which includes Fritz' own reign, so there might be more, but this is the passage Mildred was most interested in. As you can see, while the Katte description is only in a footnote, it is sourced directly to Lovenorn's report from the archives.

( Salon discusses )

Summary of the book as a whole by selenak:

( Prussian/Danish Relations according to Stephan Hartmann: The FW Era (and some spoilers for Fritz) )

( Prussian/Danish Relations according to Stephan Hartmann: The Fritz Era )

Write-up by selenak.

When oracne asked about places to visit in Germany - a future topic - , mildred_of_midgard, jokingly, replied: Wust. The joke being that Wust, or, as it's referred to today in order to differentiate it from other places called "Wust" in Germany, "Wust-Fischbach", is a tiny village in the state of Brandenburg which attracts visitors for precisely two reasons.

1.) It has a beautiful Romanesque church which had gotten a baroque makeover in the seventeenth century, and was - a few decades after WWII and with much work and funding - restored, so that it's on the map for churches to visit, and

2.) the reason why it attracted funding when a great many other wrecked churches did not: it hosts the crypt and coffins of a family that once upon a time included the future Frederick the Great's dearest friend/possible lover, Hans Hermann von Katte, who after a botched flight attempt was executed in front of young Frederick on the King (i.e. Frederick's father's) orders.

This meant tourists in the 19th century already, not to mention some gruesome graverobbing. (Several bones from Hans Hermann's skeleton are gone because of that.) Last summer, when I was travelling through Brandenburg, I visited Wust for this reason as well, and you can see the photographic results here. You can't just enter the crypt even in non-Covid-times, you have to arrange a visit with one of the local historians ahead of time, and that's what I did, early in the morning, because last August was really really hot. Which meant I basically had the church and the crypt all to myself, and my local historian waited patiently while I took photos for Mildred, for the executed Hans Hermann von Katte is her favourite.

I was also a bit reminded of the last obscure little church I visited because of who was buried there, which was St. Mary Magdalene, Hucknall Torkard, which is where Byron (the poet) and his daughter Ada (aka Ada Lovelace of computer programming invention fame) are buried. (Being buried next to the father she hadn't known had been Ada's choice, and I very much suspect it was less about him and more about delivering a final slap to her mother, the relationship with whom had gotten worse and worse over the years. (To the point where said mother thought dying painfully of cancer would at least improve Ada's chances to repent and be a good Christian again before she died.) I visited decades ago, and there was no one there at the time, either, except for me, though the local custodian said an earlier visitor had left his calling card for correspondence with interested parties.

The local Wust historian and I traded Katte stories, some of which are mentioned in the earlier linked entry with the photos, and she also gave me some reading material for my friend the American scholar studying the Katte family (read: Mildred the Fritz/Katte shipper). Said material seems to have been lost in the transatlantic mail - though luckily I had scanned it before I mailed it to Mildred. My local historian from Wust, however, has now sent me another brochure full of local material, including some more Katte stuff.

This includes a short biographical essay on Hans Hermann von Katte by a much later member of the Katte clan, one Martin Katte, which we'd seen quoted elsewhere but so far had not been able to track down in accessible form. (Especially not in times of pandemic lockdown.) Martin Katte also wrote several memoirs, one of which I had read last year, and which depressingly showed me he was one of those early 20th century conservatives who manage to mention being bffs with a war criminal without as much as nodding to the fact he was a Nazi war criminal and in general think the major fault of the Third Reich was that it wasn't a monarchy headed by Hohenzollern.

However, Martin K. had had access to family papers which other historians had not had, which is the biographical essay he wrote on the 18th century Kattes is still worth reading. (Despite having been quoted from elsewhere, I mean.) Among other things, he includes more of the letters Hans Heinrich von Katte, the executed man's father, wrote after his son's death than I saw in other sources, and as these are incredibly telling about the mentality of the time and place, as well as being both touching and stupefying, I am translating them here. All (...) were made by Martin von Katte.

For interested readers who don't want to go through the whole extensive tale at rheinsberg, here are are the most important facts to know about the writer of these letters:

( Hans Heinrich background )

Now, Hans Heinrich, faithful subject to his King, faithful Protestant and deep believer in the military has to face how feels about his oldest son being executed as a deserter on explicitly the King's orders (when a life sentence otherwise would have been possible). Here are two letters he wrote, the first to his sister-in-law, the other to his brother

( Hans Heinrich letters )

Some observations on the similarities and differences between sources that have recently been added to the katte+exection tag.

( More )

Christian Ernst von Münchow was chamber president in Neumark and resident at Küstrin in 1730. He is reported by others (including his son Christoph Alexander von Münchow, and Wilhelmine) to have brought the news of the impending execution to Friedrich and to have been present in the room with him when it took place.

On November 7, 1730, he wrote a report of the execution to Friedrich Wilhelm. This report is given by Hoffbauer in his 1905 monograph Die Kattetragödie in Cüstrin und ihre Stätte, pp. 23-24. Translation mine.

( Text )
( Translation )

The following anonymous pamphlet was published in Cologne in 1731. The copy used is this one from Google Books. It contains a two-page summary of events, followed by Katte's last letters to his stepmother, the King, his grandfather, and his father.

( Text )
( Translation )

Andrew Mitchell was the British envoy to Prussia during the Seven Years' War. He spent a lot of time with Friedrich on campaign, and they were friends. He was not present for the events of 1730. In his memoirs, he recorded a brief sentence in which Friedrich commented on the execution.

"That during his imprisonment at [Custrin] he had been treated in the harshest manner; brought to the window to see [Katt] beheaded; that he fainted away."

See selenak's write-up for more context on the memoirs and why we consider them a basically reliable source.

In this post, I've collated some of Katte's final words, written and spoken.

In late August, in prison, Katte was interrogated. The first confession that he wrote, often referred to as his "species facti," is behind the cut. The ellipses are in the source I obtained them from. [ETA: Missing material, as well as summaries of other Katte interrogations, can be found here.]

selenak, who translated the text from German, writes, "Bear in mind: Katte was threatened by torture if he didn't confess all, and of course he knew the punishment for desertion under FW if this was what it was judged to be and wanted to live, so with that caveat, here's what he said happened:"

( Species Facti 1 )

Wilhelmine records a passage Katte wrote on his prison window, before he was condemned to death:

( Prison window )

Immediately after receiving his death sentence, on November 2, 1730, Katte wrote to the King asking for a pardon. Translation is from Waldie's Select Circulating Library.

( Letter to FW )

He also wrote to his grandfather, Field Marshal von Wartensleben. Wartensleben also wrote to the King asking for a pardon, but was refused. The following letter is taken from Wilhelmine's memoirs, who likely copied it from a pamphlet that began to circulate immediately after Katte's death. The letters in it, to his father, grandfather, and brother-in-law, appear to be genuine, and were circulating in Berlin already in November 1730.

( Letter to grandfather )

The following letter, to Katte's father, written the night of November 5 at Küstrin, only hours before his execution at 7 am on November 6, is taken from Fontane. The translation is cobbled together from Wikipedia, Lavisse, Google translate, and my own limited knowledge of German.

( Letter to father )

He also wrote an undated letter to Fritz, urging repentance. The German text is found in Preuss, and the translation in Waldie. It's referred to as the "Puncta" in an August 1731 letter from Wolden to FW.

( Letter to Fritz )

There are several variants on Katte's last words to Fritz, as he was led past his window on his way to his execution. All of the exchanges involve Fritz asking for pardon, often wishing he were in Katte's place, and Katte indicating that there's nothing to forgive.

( Katte's last words )

We also had some thoughts on these documents. First, Katte's bullet-pointed last letter to Fritz.

( Who actually composed this letter? )

Then we did some digging into the question of who leaked those letters to Katte's family so quickly that they were circulating in November 1730, and they were evidently never denied and are treated as genuine. (I haven't been able to find a copy of the brother-in-law letter reported by Wilhelmine.)

First, we got our hands on the anonymous pamphlet published in 1731 that contains the leaked letters, and found that it contains a two-page summary that reads very much like an eyewitness account, in that it matches the existing eyewitness accounts--Major Schack, Preacher Besser, and Münchow--very closely, as well as FW's orders to Lepel. We therefore concluded that the leaker of the letters was someone at Küstrin.

Then it came to our attention, thanks to Koser, that the 1731 pamphlet is almost verbatim the same as the official report of the Danish envoy to Berlin, von Johnn. He, or someone close to him, is therefore almost certainly the leaker of the letters. Furthermore, the detail in his various reports pertaining to the escape attempt makes it seem like he had access to the state archives in Berlin.

So most likely, von Johnn had someone in his pay at Küstrin who was able to give him an eyewitness account of the execution, and possibly the letter to Katte's father. However, that letter may have been copied and sent to the Berlin archives, as it appears that Katte's other letters (to the King and his grandfather) written in Berlin were. From the archive, the Danish ambassador was able to get copies of the letters as well as official reports.

From him and/or his staff, the letters and the eyewitness account in the official report made their way into an anonymous pamphlet published in 1731.

ETA: Stratemann has a very similar account, recounted here, which I think may have been relayed to him via Johnn. Both reports were written in Berlin on November 11, and Johnn was no fan of FW and evidently eager to disseminate knowledge of Katte's execution to all and sundry.

( The tyrant demands blood )

Below, I present the evidence pertaining to the claim that C and V are more closely related to each other than either is to any other source. It will also be observed from the complete texts that, at a narrative level, they share many structural similarities in terms of what material they chose to include, to the exclusion of all other texts. With one possible exception, I found no linguistic similarities in the French worth reporting. That would be consistent with both of them independently recording an anecdote they heard orally from Friedrich himself, as Catt claims to have done and as Voltaire had the opportunity to do if Friedrich chose to confide in him.

( Shared innovations )

[3-19-2020 ETA: The post below was written before we became aware that there were two very different copies of Thiébault's memoirs. We were using the one rewritten by the editor in 1860, rather than the one Thiébault himself wrote in 1804. So all of the analysis below applies only to the revised edition in 1860. See this post for more details.

The conclusion therefore should be that Thiébault's editor rewrote the passage while looking at Wilhelmine's published memoirs, not that Thiébault had access to an unpublished copy.]

Below, I present the evidence pertaining to the claim that W and T are more closely related to each other than either is to P. What you should be looking for is evidence that W and T are doing the same thing more often that W and P, or W and T. If two include something and one omits it altogether, that, by itself, is not evidence of a shared origin. But if two include the same thing and the third has something different, that is evidence of a shared origin for the two.

You will notice that it's common for W and T to have the same thing and P something different, and for W and P to have the same thing and T to omit it altogether, but not for P and T to have the same thing and for Wilhelmine to have something different or even to omit it altogether.

I'm considering consider the evidence line by line (as opposed to word-by-word, or fact-by-fact), and I group it according to which possible textual relationship it supports and how strongly.

( Shared innovations )