Fritz and Heinrich Double Portrait
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rheinsbergDie preußischen Brüder: Prinz Heinrich und Friedrich der Große by Christian Graf von Krockow from 1996 is an elegant double portrait/biography essay book not always told linearly and also pondering on Prussia per se. (The author, as he admits in the foreword, hailing from Prussian nobility himself and hence finding his own upbringing etc. influencing him on his take on the brothers.)
Not being a military expert, I found it very helpful that Krockow in his double portrait of Fritz and Heinrich explains things about what each was doing in the 7 Years War in a way that laywoman me could understand, and connect to their overall relationship.
Friedrich and Heinrich as generals in the 7-Years-War
So, 1757, there's a Swedish army in Pommerania, in the west, the French beat the English (allied to Prussia), at this point the only European power which is, on July 26th at Hastenbeck, and the Duke of Cumberland (son of Uncle G2) makes a truce and surrenders Hannover. The Austrians are in the south of Saxony and are in Silesia. Berlin gets briefly occupied on October 16th and 17th by an Austrian advance troop.
Was all lost? No indeed. In the hour of danger, Friedrich proved that he was indeed a genius general. At firsst, he beat both the army of the HRE and the French on November 25th at Roßbach. He only had 22 000 men, the enemy nearly twice that many. But in this case, it was a definite and enduring victory. His own losses amounted to 550, the enemy losses to over 10 000 men. (Krockow names the generals distinguishing themselves at Roßbach in addition to Fritz: brother-in-law Ferd of Braunschweig, Seydlitz and Heinrich (who'd commanded the right flank). Only one month later, on December 1757, Friedrich beat the Austrians again at the memorable battle of Leuthen, again with far fewer men. Napoleon, who had investigated Friedrich's campaigns with an critical eye and pointed out several grave mistakes, has said with unlimited admiration of Leuthen: "This battle is a masterpiece of movements, of maneuvres and of determination; it alone would have been enough to make Friedrich immortal and assure him a place among the great generals." (...) But what use were all these victories? At this point, the war had lasted for one and a half years, and it would last more for more than five longer. The enemy could cope with these losses, but the Prussian forces were umistakably getting devoured, the more so the longer the war lasted. Especially the increasing lack of experienced officers couldn't be compensated for anymore. Part of their duty and their honor was to provide an example in battle. Which resulted in increasing losses. 33 Prussian generals died in the first four years. Until the second World War, the Prussian nobility would not pay such a bloody price again.
The more Prussian forces were exhausted, the more important defense instead of attack became - and with it Prince Heinrich. From 1758 onwards, he stepped up as a general of equal rank next to the King. A kind of work sharing developed; when Friedrich was operating on one front, and tried his luck in battle, it was Heinrich's task to keep his back free on the other front. Thus it happened in 1758 and 1759 in Saxony, in 1760 in the east, 1761 in Saxony again.
The war art of the Prince developed from two elements. On the one hand, he sought out and found advantagous positions in which eben a far superior foe could not attack him. "I will most certainly try to attack Prince Heinrich if there is opportunity", in 1760 the Russian commander General Saltykov protested against the accusation of failing to take initiative. "But so far, he's always taken up such advantagous and unassailable positions that it has been impossible to lure him into battle." The same experience was made by the Austrian field marshal Daun in Saxony.
On the other hand, a successful defense needs movement. The prince always averted being pinned down, showed up unexpectedly in the enemy's flank and threatened his opponent's supply lines. Sometimes, he even conducted assaults deep behind enemy lines which confused the enemy and brought him rich loot, as early in 1758 from the west till Braunschweig and Hildesheim, later in the southern west through Thuringia until Bamberg and Nuremberg.
Most of all, though, Heinrich paid attention to keeping his losses low, as opposed to Friedrich. With Friedrich, not only the defeats like Hochkirch in 1758 and Kunersdorf in 1759 but also his successes cost a lot of blood. At his "victory" near Torgau, for example, on November 3rd 1760, Friedrich lost 16 700 men, a third of his army, and the "beaten" enemy, as it had in Prague, a thousand men less. The difference became especially glaring when Friedrich decided to "come to his brother's aid" and took the command from him, in the autumn of 1759, when he wanted to push the Austrians out of Saxony before the start of winter. Against Heinrich's urgent advice, he sent General Finck in the enemy's back. Which resulted in Finck himself getting trapped; Finck had to capitulate on November 21st at Maxen with 14 000 men.
"My God, is it possible? Did I bring my bad luck with me to Saxony?" wrote a desperate Friedrich and promptly blamed Finck, exclusively so. Heinrich, who was enraged, wrote bitterly: "From the day he's arrived at my army, he's brought disaster and disorganisation; all my efforts in this campaign and the luck which has favored me so far, all lost through Friedrich." (...) He was, however, anything but soft himself; if he wanted to keep his losses to minimum, he still demanded everything from his soldiers on the repeated violent marches he put them through. He did take care of them, though; few things were more important to him than securing their supplies, and he always planned far ahead to secure good winter quarters. For this, the soldiers loved him and started to trust him like few others. They did willingly what he asked of them. (...)
Post-Fritz defeat at Kunersdorf in the August of 1759: On September 23rd, Field Marshal Daun started to go east from Bautzen in order to crush Heinrich whom he'd believed to be near Görlitz. Heinrich, however, circumvented him, crossed in two nightly marches more than 80 kilometres and suprised the Austrians on September 25th at Hoyerwerda. The Prussians lost only 44 men, the Austrians lost nearly 2000 men, 1800 of which were taken prisoner. Daun returned to Bautzen in such haste that en march, he lost another 3000 men due to sheer exhaustion or desertion.
Such numbers were better than those in most won battles. More importantly, the Prussian army's faith in itself grew again. Mitchell - the English Ambassador, Andrew Mitchell, a great admirer of Fritz and on the front lines with either him and hish brother most of the time - called Heinrich's maneuvre "incredible" and noted: "I had the pleasure of admiring the coolness and presence of mind, with which his Royal Highness gave his orders during the action, and the humanity and goodness with which he treated his prisoners after the action was over.“ Somewhat later, Mitchell wrote that the Prince had proved "very great military talent, and though his constitution is not robust, he's indefatigable. I observe but one failing, which is in the blood; he exposes his person too much and upon slight occasions." (...) Napoleon later judged similarly, especially about Heinrich's 1761 campaign. However, these were not the kind of glorious - and bloody - battles highlighted in history books.
In an aside, Mitchell points out something which is actually a main feature Heinrich's humanity and benevolence towards the defeated people. It showed itself early, as for example after the battle of Roßbach towards the captured French. Friedrich was far more ruthless, and more than once, the brothers clashed about this. A revenge act like the plundering of Hubertusburg Palace which Friedrich had ordered Heinrich never permitted his men, nor anything like the ravaging of Dresden in July 1760, which without any military benefit destroyed a good deal of the town and irreplacable works of art. (...) Heinrich insisted that the population should be spared if at all possible, and needed to be given the means for survival. No area should be allowed to be turned into a desert, including the hostile Saxony. (...) Heinrich's American biographer Chester V. Easum has written: "Friedrich was the more modern of the two. Through the whole war, the King defended and exercised the totalitarian way of war. The younger brother tried in every possible way to limit the horror of warfare."
The expression "totalitarian" may be wrong here, since it belongs into another age. But there was a difference between attitude and methods, and if Friedrich was really the more modern campaigner, one would like to stay old fashioned with Heinrich. Perhaps this is at the heart of the abyss, the passionate hatred Heinrich had for his brother. "The cruelest beast Europe has produced", the Prince called the King. This, in turn, was what later historians objected to and which made them point out the twistedness in Heinrich's own character But at least the contemporaries and the people concerned saw him differently. When he later, years into the peace, travelled through Saxony en route to Karlsbad, this Prussian was received with applause and shouts of blessing.
Heinrich fought the last battle of the great war on October 29th 1762. Near Freiberg in Saxony, he defeated a superior army of Austrians and HRE troops. 79 enemy officers and 4340 common soldiers were taken prisoners. Typically, Heinrich wrote afterwards to Andrew Mitchell: " I am most satisfied that our own losses were not too great, and there was no bloodshed that could have been avoided."
If one tries to draw a balance, then it has to be pointed out firstly that Prussia was saved because the Czarina Elizabeth died on January 5th 1762 (...) Secondly, it was because of Friedrich, his energy and his dogged determination to endure. Jacob Burckhardt has paid tribute to this when he wrote: "Fates of people and states and entire civilisations can sometimes depend on the fact that one extraordinary man can endure tensions and pressures of the soul and physical hardship in the greatest degree. The entire subsequent history of continental Europe was changed by the fact that Frederick the Great managed to do this from 1759 to 1763 in a supreme degree."
But it also depended on Heinrich. Without his talent as a general which stopped and froze superior enemy forces again and again, Friedrich could not have endured in the later war years named by Burckhardt. In one phrase: the Prince saved the King.
On the other hand, Friedrich's incredible will to persist really was unique. If the King had died in 1759 at Kunersdorf or would indeed have committed suicide, a Prince Regent Heinrich would have gone for a quick peace, even at the price of losing Silesia to Austria again. The Prussian rise would have remained an episode, and subsequent German history would have been inmeasurably different. So the truth is that these brothers, at once so similar and so different to each other, tied to each other for their lives preserved Prussia's new rank as a European super power.
In his way, Friedrich acknowledged his brother's achievement. At a banquet which he gave for his generals soon after the war, he provided a manouevre critique and dispensed both praise and blame, which included himself. At the end, he turned towards Heinrich and said: "Now, Gentlemen, let us toast the one general who did not make a single mistake throughout this entire war. To you, my brother!"
We don't know what Heinrich replied. During the war, he'd once written to their brother Ferdinand that Friedrich would banish and destroy him once he didn't need him anymore, just as it had happened to August Wilhelm. "He's too malicious not to avenge himself for owing me." Did he remember this now? Did he inwardly apologize? Probably not. Most likely, he only bowed to Friedrich in silence.
While focusing on the military aspect far more than Ziebura, Krockow equally delivers some key quotes from the letters on their family dysfunction.
Oh, how I hate you, let me count the ways
Such as Heinrich's reply to Fritz' infamous condolence letter: In the terrible shock the death of my brother has caused, it would have been impossible fo rme to write to you about a subject which to me is incredibly painful if it hadn't pleased you to write the letter adressed to me. The feelings which move me right now are more powerful than reason. I keep seeing the image of the brother whom I loved so tenderly, his last hours, his death. Of all the sad changes and misfortunes life can offer and from which I have not been always spared, this is the most cruel and most terrible that could have struck.
Fritz writes back, trying again. Heinrich is not moved. I have sighed enough about the misunderstanding between you and my brother. Now you keep reawakening the memory and encrease my pain. Only the respect I owe you and my pain keep me silent, and I am not allowed to reply.
Just in case this isn't enough of an 18th century style "Fuck you, Fritz" (with the obelisk awaiting), Krockow also quotes the letter about Heinrich's visit to Wilhelmine, which I had only seen paraphrased as "he saw she was dying, and so he didn't tell her about AW" in the Wilhelmine biography. In the actual text excerpt, well....
My Bayreuth sister is close to death. She cannot write to you. I am afraid that she will not recover from this illness. She doesn't know about my brother's death yet, for one is justly concerned here that telling her about this news would destroy even the glimmer of hope for her survival.
In other words: Fritz, you know, the sibling YOU love? You've killed her along with the one I loved best as well. Think about that while you're in the field. Think long and hard.
(Heinrich: has learned the Fritzian lesson of how to deliver words that truly hurt and go to the heart with frightening efficiency.)
(And it occured to me that the nightmare Fritz told Henri de Catt about, of Wilhelmine (of all the people) accusing him not to love their father enough, might actually be a classic case of transference even more than I thought, with FW standing in for AW as well.)
Von Krockow also quotes this bitter assessment from Heinrich in 1760 (i.e. at a point where AW is already dead but Heinrich himself, even in Fritz' estimation, has emerged as the major military talent of this war)where he writes to Ferdinand: "You are kind enough to ascribe the saving of the state to me; but even if I had all the abilities you are ascribing to me, they wouldn't be of any use, since I can't go against the will of the one who is dragging us all with him. He who commands under the King loses honor and reputation. (...) 'The State', my dear brother, is a name that gets used to throw sand into the eyes of the public; a villain who claims every success for himself and whom one serves like a human sacrifice."
Krockow is with Mildred that the Fritz/Heinrich relationship is basically an eerie RP of FW/Fritz, and also in this that if FW, long after his death, was the figure Fritz still wanted love and pride from as well along with wanting to be his opposite, Fritz was that very figure for Heinrich. He seems to have been absolutely indifferent towards their father, there's no remark, either good or bad, on the record. The one he hated passionately and knocked himself out to work for and kept writing at least once a week to while he was still alive and kept obsessing about after his death was Fritz.
Linguistic and cultural trivia
On to lighter matters: Mildred, contemporaries did testify that Heinrich as an adult did pretend not to speak German, but they always say "pretend", i.e. no one believed this was actually true. As opposed to his brothers, he managed to visit Paris twice (once when Louis XVI had to stand sponsor for the big credit needed to pay Heinrich's boyfriend's debts), and the people he met were charmed (and found him less opinionated than Joseph and less of an irritaging chatterbox than Gustav, the two most recent royal visitors) and testified he spoke an elegant French - but with a distinct "Germanic" accent. (Not surprising, since all the Prussian royals were taught French by Huguenot emigré descendants who had themselves been born in various German principalitis.) (Fritz seems to have had something of an accent, too, at least if Voltaire is anything to go by, who mentions he had to point out that "opinion" isn't pronounced with a g at the end.)
There is a lengthy description of Heinrich in his old age at Rheinsberg by a Count Henckel von Donnersmark (of whom the director of "The Lives of Others" is descended, btw) who had been his ACD in the war, which is over three pages, so I can't quote it in a comment, but it does mention that when the hour got very late, Heinrich's "no, I don't speak German,not me" slipped, especially when the 7 Years War got discussed, and a favored phrase was "Das will ich Ihnen noch sagen" ("one more thing I want to tell you"). Like Fritz, he had the local theatre play only French plays, all the time, though less exclusively Voltaire focused. And he did look like a figure from an older world in the end, with his Ancien Regime fashion and wig (Heinrich lived into the 19th century, after all), an excentric gentlemen with impeccable manners till the very end.
Boyfriends
Krockow is laudably not coy re: the sexual orientation ob both brothers; though it's not his main subject, he devotes a chapter to Fritz/Fredersdorf on the one hand and Heinrich/his various boyfriends on the other, from which I learned Heinrich in his old age finally managed to score one who wasn't yet another charismatic money waster but kind and devoted, a French emigré officer, Antoine Count La Roche-Aymon. Krockow quotes Fontane (from his Rheinsberg chapter - that travel book, I tell you!): "Beautiful, graceful, amiable, an old school chevalier in the best sense of the world, he soon moved into a position of trust, and then into a relationship of the heart with the prince, of the type the later had not been able to enjoy since Tauentzien." (A previous boyfriend.) "The Count appeared as a present from heaven to him, the evening of his life had arrived, but behold, the setting sun gave him once more a beam of warming light."
In his last will, revised a few months before his death, Heinrich had mentioned him as follows: "I express my urgent gratitude towards the Count La Roche-Aymon for the tender devotion he has shown towards me during all the time I was happy enough to have him near me."
Krockow's resumé that life, in the end, had been kind to Heinrich.
Not being a military expert, I found it very helpful that Krockow in his double portrait of Fritz and Heinrich explains things about what each was doing in the 7 Years War in a way that laywoman me could understand, and connect to their overall relationship.
Friedrich and Heinrich as generals in the 7-Years-War
So, 1757, there's a Swedish army in Pommerania, in the west, the French beat the English (allied to Prussia), at this point the only European power which is, on July 26th at Hastenbeck, and the Duke of Cumberland (son of Uncle G2) makes a truce and surrenders Hannover. The Austrians are in the south of Saxony and are in Silesia. Berlin gets briefly occupied on October 16th and 17th by an Austrian advance troop.
Was all lost? No indeed. In the hour of danger, Friedrich proved that he was indeed a genius general. At firsst, he beat both the army of the HRE and the French on November 25th at Roßbach. He only had 22 000 men, the enemy nearly twice that many. But in this case, it was a definite and enduring victory. His own losses amounted to 550, the enemy losses to over 10 000 men. (Krockow names the generals distinguishing themselves at Roßbach in addition to Fritz: brother-in-law Ferd of Braunschweig, Seydlitz and Heinrich (who'd commanded the right flank). Only one month later, on December 1757, Friedrich beat the Austrians again at the memorable battle of Leuthen, again with far fewer men. Napoleon, who had investigated Friedrich's campaigns with an critical eye and pointed out several grave mistakes, has said with unlimited admiration of Leuthen: "This battle is a masterpiece of movements, of maneuvres and of determination; it alone would have been enough to make Friedrich immortal and assure him a place among the great generals." (...) But what use were all these victories? At this point, the war had lasted for one and a half years, and it would last more for more than five longer. The enemy could cope with these losses, but the Prussian forces were umistakably getting devoured, the more so the longer the war lasted. Especially the increasing lack of experienced officers couldn't be compensated for anymore. Part of their duty and their honor was to provide an example in battle. Which resulted in increasing losses. 33 Prussian generals died in the first four years. Until the second World War, the Prussian nobility would not pay such a bloody price again.
The more Prussian forces were exhausted, the more important defense instead of attack became - and with it Prince Heinrich. From 1758 onwards, he stepped up as a general of equal rank next to the King. A kind of work sharing developed; when Friedrich was operating on one front, and tried his luck in battle, it was Heinrich's task to keep his back free on the other front. Thus it happened in 1758 and 1759 in Saxony, in 1760 in the east, 1761 in Saxony again.
The war art of the Prince developed from two elements. On the one hand, he sought out and found advantagous positions in which eben a far superior foe could not attack him. "I will most certainly try to attack Prince Heinrich if there is opportunity", in 1760 the Russian commander General Saltykov protested against the accusation of failing to take initiative. "But so far, he's always taken up such advantagous and unassailable positions that it has been impossible to lure him into battle." The same experience was made by the Austrian field marshal Daun in Saxony.
On the other hand, a successful defense needs movement. The prince always averted being pinned down, showed up unexpectedly in the enemy's flank and threatened his opponent's supply lines. Sometimes, he even conducted assaults deep behind enemy lines which confused the enemy and brought him rich loot, as early in 1758 from the west till Braunschweig and Hildesheim, later in the southern west through Thuringia until Bamberg and Nuremberg.
Most of all, though, Heinrich paid attention to keeping his losses low, as opposed to Friedrich. With Friedrich, not only the defeats like Hochkirch in 1758 and Kunersdorf in 1759 but also his successes cost a lot of blood. At his "victory" near Torgau, for example, on November 3rd 1760, Friedrich lost 16 700 men, a third of his army, and the "beaten" enemy, as it had in Prague, a thousand men less. The difference became especially glaring when Friedrich decided to "come to his brother's aid" and took the command from him, in the autumn of 1759, when he wanted to push the Austrians out of Saxony before the start of winter. Against Heinrich's urgent advice, he sent General Finck in the enemy's back. Which resulted in Finck himself getting trapped; Finck had to capitulate on November 21st at Maxen with 14 000 men.
"My God, is it possible? Did I bring my bad luck with me to Saxony?" wrote a desperate Friedrich and promptly blamed Finck, exclusively so. Heinrich, who was enraged, wrote bitterly: "From the day he's arrived at my army, he's brought disaster and disorganisation; all my efforts in this campaign and the luck which has favored me so far, all lost through Friedrich." (...) He was, however, anything but soft himself; if he wanted to keep his losses to minimum, he still demanded everything from his soldiers on the repeated violent marches he put them through. He did take care of them, though; few things were more important to him than securing their supplies, and he always planned far ahead to secure good winter quarters. For this, the soldiers loved him and started to trust him like few others. They did willingly what he asked of them. (...)
Post-Fritz defeat at Kunersdorf in the August of 1759: On September 23rd, Field Marshal Daun started to go east from Bautzen in order to crush Heinrich whom he'd believed to be near Görlitz. Heinrich, however, circumvented him, crossed in two nightly marches more than 80 kilometres and suprised the Austrians on September 25th at Hoyerwerda. The Prussians lost only 44 men, the Austrians lost nearly 2000 men, 1800 of which were taken prisoner. Daun returned to Bautzen in such haste that en march, he lost another 3000 men due to sheer exhaustion or desertion.
Such numbers were better than those in most won battles. More importantly, the Prussian army's faith in itself grew again. Mitchell - the English Ambassador, Andrew Mitchell, a great admirer of Fritz and on the front lines with either him and hish brother most of the time - called Heinrich's maneuvre "incredible" and noted: "I had the pleasure of admiring the coolness and presence of mind, with which his Royal Highness gave his orders during the action, and the humanity and goodness with which he treated his prisoners after the action was over.“ Somewhat later, Mitchell wrote that the Prince had proved "very great military talent, and though his constitution is not robust, he's indefatigable. I observe but one failing, which is in the blood; he exposes his person too much and upon slight occasions." (...) Napoleon later judged similarly, especially about Heinrich's 1761 campaign. However, these were not the kind of glorious - and bloody - battles highlighted in history books.
In an aside, Mitchell points out something which is actually a main feature Heinrich's humanity and benevolence towards the defeated people. It showed itself early, as for example after the battle of Roßbach towards the captured French. Friedrich was far more ruthless, and more than once, the brothers clashed about this. A revenge act like the plundering of Hubertusburg Palace which Friedrich had ordered Heinrich never permitted his men, nor anything like the ravaging of Dresden in July 1760, which without any military benefit destroyed a good deal of the town and irreplacable works of art. (...) Heinrich insisted that the population should be spared if at all possible, and needed to be given the means for survival. No area should be allowed to be turned into a desert, including the hostile Saxony. (...) Heinrich's American biographer Chester V. Easum has written: "Friedrich was the more modern of the two. Through the whole war, the King defended and exercised the totalitarian way of war. The younger brother tried in every possible way to limit the horror of warfare."
The expression "totalitarian" may be wrong here, since it belongs into another age. But there was a difference between attitude and methods, and if Friedrich was really the more modern campaigner, one would like to stay old fashioned with Heinrich. Perhaps this is at the heart of the abyss, the passionate hatred Heinrich had for his brother. "The cruelest beast Europe has produced", the Prince called the King. This, in turn, was what later historians objected to and which made them point out the twistedness in Heinrich's own character But at least the contemporaries and the people concerned saw him differently. When he later, years into the peace, travelled through Saxony en route to Karlsbad, this Prussian was received with applause and shouts of blessing.
Heinrich fought the last battle of the great war on October 29th 1762. Near Freiberg in Saxony, he defeated a superior army of Austrians and HRE troops. 79 enemy officers and 4340 common soldiers were taken prisoners. Typically, Heinrich wrote afterwards to Andrew Mitchell: " I am most satisfied that our own losses were not too great, and there was no bloodshed that could have been avoided."
If one tries to draw a balance, then it has to be pointed out firstly that Prussia was saved because the Czarina Elizabeth died on January 5th 1762 (...) Secondly, it was because of Friedrich, his energy and his dogged determination to endure. Jacob Burckhardt has paid tribute to this when he wrote: "Fates of people and states and entire civilisations can sometimes depend on the fact that one extraordinary man can endure tensions and pressures of the soul and physical hardship in the greatest degree. The entire subsequent history of continental Europe was changed by the fact that Frederick the Great managed to do this from 1759 to 1763 in a supreme degree."
But it also depended on Heinrich. Without his talent as a general which stopped and froze superior enemy forces again and again, Friedrich could not have endured in the later war years named by Burckhardt. In one phrase: the Prince saved the King.
On the other hand, Friedrich's incredible will to persist really was unique. If the King had died in 1759 at Kunersdorf or would indeed have committed suicide, a Prince Regent Heinrich would have gone for a quick peace, even at the price of losing Silesia to Austria again. The Prussian rise would have remained an episode, and subsequent German history would have been inmeasurably different. So the truth is that these brothers, at once so similar and so different to each other, tied to each other for their lives preserved Prussia's new rank as a European super power.
In his way, Friedrich acknowledged his brother's achievement. At a banquet which he gave for his generals soon after the war, he provided a manouevre critique and dispensed both praise and blame, which included himself. At the end, he turned towards Heinrich and said: "Now, Gentlemen, let us toast the one general who did not make a single mistake throughout this entire war. To you, my brother!"
We don't know what Heinrich replied. During the war, he'd once written to their brother Ferdinand that Friedrich would banish and destroy him once he didn't need him anymore, just as it had happened to August Wilhelm. "He's too malicious not to avenge himself for owing me." Did he remember this now? Did he inwardly apologize? Probably not. Most likely, he only bowed to Friedrich in silence.
While focusing on the military aspect far more than Ziebura, Krockow equally delivers some key quotes from the letters on their family dysfunction.
Oh, how I hate you, let me count the ways
Such as Heinrich's reply to Fritz' infamous condolence letter: In the terrible shock the death of my brother has caused, it would have been impossible fo rme to write to you about a subject which to me is incredibly painful if it hadn't pleased you to write the letter adressed to me. The feelings which move me right now are more powerful than reason. I keep seeing the image of the brother whom I loved so tenderly, his last hours, his death. Of all the sad changes and misfortunes life can offer and from which I have not been always spared, this is the most cruel and most terrible that could have struck.
Fritz writes back, trying again. Heinrich is not moved. I have sighed enough about the misunderstanding between you and my brother. Now you keep reawakening the memory and encrease my pain. Only the respect I owe you and my pain keep me silent, and I am not allowed to reply.
Just in case this isn't enough of an 18th century style "Fuck you, Fritz" (with the obelisk awaiting), Krockow also quotes the letter about Heinrich's visit to Wilhelmine, which I had only seen paraphrased as "he saw she was dying, and so he didn't tell her about AW" in the Wilhelmine biography. In the actual text excerpt, well....
My Bayreuth sister is close to death. She cannot write to you. I am afraid that she will not recover from this illness. She doesn't know about my brother's death yet, for one is justly concerned here that telling her about this news would destroy even the glimmer of hope for her survival.
In other words: Fritz, you know, the sibling YOU love? You've killed her along with the one I loved best as well. Think about that while you're in the field. Think long and hard.
(Heinrich: has learned the Fritzian lesson of how to deliver words that truly hurt and go to the heart with frightening efficiency.)
(And it occured to me that the nightmare Fritz told Henri de Catt about, of Wilhelmine (of all the people) accusing him not to love their father enough, might actually be a classic case of transference even more than I thought, with FW standing in for AW as well.)
Von Krockow also quotes this bitter assessment from Heinrich in 1760 (i.e. at a point where AW is already dead but Heinrich himself, even in Fritz' estimation, has emerged as the major military talent of this war)where he writes to Ferdinand: "You are kind enough to ascribe the saving of the state to me; but even if I had all the abilities you are ascribing to me, they wouldn't be of any use, since I can't go against the will of the one who is dragging us all with him. He who commands under the King loses honor and reputation. (...) 'The State', my dear brother, is a name that gets used to throw sand into the eyes of the public; a villain who claims every success for himself and whom one serves like a human sacrifice."
Krockow is with Mildred that the Fritz/Heinrich relationship is basically an eerie RP of FW/Fritz, and also in this that if FW, long after his death, was the figure Fritz still wanted love and pride from as well along with wanting to be his opposite, Fritz was that very figure for Heinrich. He seems to have been absolutely indifferent towards their father, there's no remark, either good or bad, on the record. The one he hated passionately and knocked himself out to work for and kept writing at least once a week to while he was still alive and kept obsessing about after his death was Fritz.
Linguistic and cultural trivia
On to lighter matters: Mildred, contemporaries did testify that Heinrich as an adult did pretend not to speak German, but they always say "pretend", i.e. no one believed this was actually true. As opposed to his brothers, he managed to visit Paris twice (once when Louis XVI had to stand sponsor for the big credit needed to pay Heinrich's boyfriend's debts), and the people he met were charmed (and found him less opinionated than Joseph and less of an irritaging chatterbox than Gustav, the two most recent royal visitors) and testified he spoke an elegant French - but with a distinct "Germanic" accent. (Not surprising, since all the Prussian royals were taught French by Huguenot emigré descendants who had themselves been born in various German principalitis.) (Fritz seems to have had something of an accent, too, at least if Voltaire is anything to go by, who mentions he had to point out that "opinion" isn't pronounced with a g at the end.)
There is a lengthy description of Heinrich in his old age at Rheinsberg by a Count Henckel von Donnersmark (of whom the director of "The Lives of Others" is descended, btw) who had been his ACD in the war, which is over three pages, so I can't quote it in a comment, but it does mention that when the hour got very late, Heinrich's "no, I don't speak German,not me" slipped, especially when the 7 Years War got discussed, and a favored phrase was "Das will ich Ihnen noch sagen" ("one more thing I want to tell you"). Like Fritz, he had the local theatre play only French plays, all the time, though less exclusively Voltaire focused. And he did look like a figure from an older world in the end, with his Ancien Regime fashion and wig (Heinrich lived into the 19th century, after all), an excentric gentlemen with impeccable manners till the very end.
Boyfriends
Krockow is laudably not coy re: the sexual orientation ob both brothers; though it's not his main subject, he devotes a chapter to Fritz/Fredersdorf on the one hand and Heinrich/his various boyfriends on the other, from which I learned Heinrich in his old age finally managed to score one who wasn't yet another charismatic money waster but kind and devoted, a French emigré officer, Antoine Count La Roche-Aymon. Krockow quotes Fontane (from his Rheinsberg chapter - that travel book, I tell you!): "Beautiful, graceful, amiable, an old school chevalier in the best sense of the world, he soon moved into a position of trust, and then into a relationship of the heart with the prince, of the type the later had not been able to enjoy since Tauentzien." (A previous boyfriend.) "The Count appeared as a present from heaven to him, the evening of his life had arrived, but behold, the setting sun gave him once more a beam of warming light."
In his last will, revised a few months before his death, Heinrich had mentioned him as follows: "I express my urgent gratitude towards the Count La Roche-Aymon for the tender devotion he has shown towards me during all the time I was happy enough to have him near me."
Krockow's resumé that life, in the end, had been kind to Heinrich.
