“I feel like I’m entering the Fatherland,” Charlotte told the mourners as her carriage crossed the Russian border. The Cossack convoy that met her burst out “Hurrah!”, the princess told them in Russian: “Thank you, guys.” Then she turned to the Cossack colonel: “Please order them to shout again, I like it…” She sought to speak Russian with those courtiers who did not know foreign languages. However, despite the fact that her teacher was the poet Vasily Zhukovsky, Charlotte did not learn Russian until the end of her life.
The wife of some Hohenzollern Markgrave, irritated by the city life: What is this? A haunted hill? Cursed, more than a millennium ago, so that no one can live on it? I absolutely must build a castle here!
The resident mountain ghost: Ah bollocks, not again. Hertha, where is my monk outfit?
Some 17th century villagers who were smart enough to head the warnings and just settle on the side of the hill: Wait, so they tried to build a castle AGAIN? And it’s haunted AGAIN? Incredible. So anyway, where’s my plow?
Germans don’t start overt revolutions like those Frenchmen, here we prefer to write calm acoustic songs about our monarchs, pointing out all their flaws, after they’re long gone.
An excerpt from the lyrics for the non-Germanophone people out there:
I leisurely stroll through the Friedrichsstraße [Fredericks-Street] and ask myself
Which of the many Fredericks is it actually named after?
Well, maybe Frederick William I, who they call the “Soldier King”
Who we know from the forced recruitment of the “Langen Kerls” [”tall guys”, a Prussian regiment of taller-than-average men]
A stingy military-head, know for his art of squeezing money out of people
And the invention of the Prussian virtue of beheading children
Who locked his son, together with his cherished buddy Katte,
Into the fortress in Küstrin, because they had run off once
Where he let poor Katte’s head be chopped of
Before his son’s eyes, as they say, just as a rebuke
And if he hadn’t been held back, then he would’ve immediately
Beheaded his own son, unperturbed, so that he’ll turn into a proper man someday
It has to be a different Friedrich, for in this pious country
One wouldn’t have named a street after such a hoodlum
Maybe after Frederick II, Old Fritz, tough and authoritarian
And nothing on his mind except his dogs and his military
And especially not his wife, “I will cast her out”
“As soon as I am the master in this house”, is that why one calls him Frederick the Great?
Well granted, it was he who brought the potato to Germany
But it was also he who put our neighbour off our literature
In eleven year of war he fought fifteen bloody battles
And carried the damn militarism over into our time
Even today he still causes trouble under the earth
With the order that he be buried with his dogs
Only King Helmut [Helmut Kohl, German Chancellor from 1982 to 1998] obeyed, now his dogs have him
The old bone, and we have his Equestrian statue in the middle of Berlin
Frederick Wilhelm I: Be pious, may God and Jesus protect all my successors
Frederick the Great: Everything dies, permanence is a lie, death is the end (but look at these neat territories it would be really convenient to possess)
Just because a man canenjoyliberté de conscience et de verge, doesn’t mean he should have sexual relations with a donkey.
After a man in Brandenburg-Prussia was sentenced to death for engaging in inappropriate conduct with a female donkey, Frederick the Great personally annulled the sentence, allegedly (because you can’t quite trust Voltaire’s dramatic recounts of events) reasoning that in his lands one enjoys “liberté de conscience et de verge” / “freedom of both conscience and penis”
Voltaire in general just appeared rather willing to perhaps overstate things to suit the literary tastes of the French public, or else share any and all gossip he came across at court. The slightly dicey references to Frederick’s homosexual exploits to be found in his memoirs either fall into the category of artistic freedom, or we can conclude Voltaire really was willing to publish everyone’s private life for some publicity. Cue affronted German/Prussian writers then doing their utmost to emphasise Frederick’s complete and utter heterosexuality at every possible opportunity.
