1740 and All That

Or, one of the most notorious fanboy vs fanboy(s) flame wars since Platon & Co. argued whether Achilles or Patroclos topped. Johann Georg (von, but not yet) Zimmermann started out as a (practising, not just studied) doctor, with literature as his second passion, then started to publish as well, became a member of various Academies of Sciences in various countries as well as court physician of George III. in Hannover. (Bear in mind here that George III. was the first of the Hanover Georges to never visit Hannover (it came with also being the first to being born on British soil and having grown up with English as his primary language); G3 still was reigning Prince Elector of Hanover, though, and as such maintained a separate Hanover court. (Once his younger sons were old enough to study in Göttingen, which was a university the House of Hannover sponsored, they were present.) And that's where Zimmermann was court physician. Zimmermann first met Fritz, whom he idolized, in 1771, and this personal encounter was even in Rococo age terms very intense. To quote one of Fritz' latest biographers, Tim Blanning:

After his first encounter with his hero in 1771 [Zimmermann] left the room in floods of tears, exclaiming, “Oh, my love for the King of Prussia is beyond words!”

The book that made Zimmerman known internationally as well as in the German states before Fritz' death was "Über die Einsamkeit" ("About Loneliness"), dealing with melancholy and its effects, published 1784/1785. Among other things, it got him a correspondence with Catherine the Great, a membership in the St. Petersburg Academy and an annoblement from Catherine, which was very recent in the years we're talking about. He was summoned by Fritz to Sanssouci from June 23rd to July 11th 1786 and thus was among the last foreign visitors to encounter the dying King. Now, until and including this point, Zimmermann had been on friendly terms with Berlin's literary circles, including with Friedrich Nicolai. In 1788, when Nicolai published the first of his six volumes of Frederician anecdotes, he mentions Zimmermann as a friend and encourager of his anecdote collecting project in the preface.

However, in 1788, Zimmermann also published, and not with Nicolai: " Über Friedrich den Grossen und meine Unterredungen mit ihm kurz vor seinem Tode. Von dem Ritter von Zimmermann." Leipzig 1788, one and a half year after Friedrich's death. ("About Frederick the Great and my conversations with him shortly before his death. By the baronet von Zimmermann.") Even in the flood of anecdote collections and memoirs, this was a bestseller, since Zimmermann had the undeniable advantage of near deathbed conversations, as well as a until then excellent reputation, both as a doctor and a writer.

( Conversations: Review of a bestseller )

While the book sold very well, there was some snark about Zimmermann's early anti Enlightenment digs as well as about his pride in his now being Ritter von Zimmermann (confidant of monarchs) in the reviews. This, Zimmermann saw as mere envy and betrayal, especially on the part of (now former) friends like Nicolai, whom he attacks as a Fritz misunderstanding ignoramus in his next publication, Fragmente über Friedrich den Großen, zur Geschichte seines Lebens, seiner Regierung und seines Charakters, von dem Ritter von Zimmermann (1790, Leipzig, Weidmannsche Buchhandlung), about which you can read my detailed summary in the entry I just linked. This was the book that made Zimmermann go from famous to notorious, as it presents what we nicknamed the "broken penis" theory. (Briefly: far from disliking women, Frederick the Great had too much sex with them as a young man, got STD, got a supposed cure by a medical hack recced to him by his Schwedt Cousin, married EC, had six months of blissful marital sex with her before the STD resurfaced, then had a operation on his penis which was botched, resulting in a malformed penis and psychological (not actual, this point is important to Zimmermann) impotence, which Frederick then tried to cover up by pretending to be gay. Fragments thus became the primary canon for a lot of no homo historians through the centuries. One more thing: in true Chinese whisper fashion, I've seen the claim that Zimmermann, as Fritz' (temporary) doctor, ought to know since presumably would have seen the broken penis in question. However, he himself makes no such claim. Fritz' notorious later years dislike of being seen in the nude by anyone is in fact part of his theory as to the reason for it.

After "Fragments" got published, a publication storm broke loose. Not just because of Zimmermann's main theory but because of a couple of additional theories he voices in this book as well as its general anti Enlightenment tendency. Nonetheless, Zimmermann's book is why the world has signed and written testimonies on the state of Frederick the Great's penis, which first saw the light of day in the publications by Büsching and Friedrich Nicolai that were immediately written and published to counter Zimmermann's claim. Nicolai's book is a detailed refutation of Zimmermann's everything, which is why you now get a review and summary of:

( Friedrich Nicolai: Freymüthige Anmerkungen über des Herrn Ritters von Zimmermann Fragmente über Friedrich den Großen )

The only writer of note siding with Zimmermann in this argument was dramatist August von Kotzebue (himself to later suffer a tragic fate: he was assassinated by a student, an event which triggered the so called Karlsbader Beschlüsse that were to plunge the post Napoleonic German states into a miasma of censorship, harsh prison sentences and general conservatism decades later), who published a pamphlet called "Doctor Bahrdt mit der eisernen Stirn, oder Die deutsche Union gegen Zimmermann". Since Kotzebue did this not under his own name, but by pretending the Freiherr von Knigge, famously the author of a "how to behave among gentlemen" treatise, was the author, Knigge sued, not Kotzebue but Zimmermann. And then Georg Christoph Lichtenberg wrote a Zimmermann satire for good measure. At which point Zimmermann wrote his petition to the ruling Emperor (who was Leopold, brother of Joseph, MT s second surviving son) asking for a really hard smackdown of all these people whose lack of morals and ethics were what you got if were were free thinker without being such an exceptional human being as Frederick the Great. The state of whose genitals was now better documented than that of any other of his contemporaries. Not that this has stopped no-homo historians to pick up on Zimmermann's key theory and run with it ever since.

Somewhat belatedly as I just realised I haven't put them up here yet, my notes (from March this year) on the diary of Girolamo Lucchesini, lector and librarian to Friedrich II in his final years, later diplomat in the Prussian service, still later working as chamberlain for Napoleon's sister Elisa. Lucchesini was credited by contemporaries as different as Johann Georg von Zimmermann (who assures us that no one, but no one, looked sharper into Fritz' heart than "this witty, learned and amiable Italian" and Lehndorff in his 1783 diary ("He reminds me vividly of Count Algarotti, who used to occupy a similar position in the King‘s life. One can call his nature angelic") as being an immensly charming and amiable Fritz manager. Goethe, who met him a year after Fritz' death, had a positive impression as well about him as well but was a bit more salty about Lucchesini's, shall we say, adaptability: The arrival of the Marchese Lucchesini has pushed my departure to a few days; I have had a lot of pleasure getting to know him. He seems to me to be one of those people who have a good moral stomach to always be able to enjoy sitting at the table of the world's luminaries; instead of ours being overcrowded like a ruminant animal's at times and then unable to eat anything else until it has finished repeated chewing and digesting.

Like Henri de Catt, Lucchesini kept a diary during his early years as Fritz' reader, and unlike Catt, he wasn't later found out to have beefed up the resulting memoirs as if he were a historical novelist. However, reading through the (slim) published result, it became immediately apparant to me why Lucchesini's diary never achieved the same popularity as Catt's either with historians nor with the rest of us sensationalistic gossip mongers. (Starting with the very different circumstances - Catt starts his time as Fritz' reader mid Seven-Years-War when the inner and outer crisis of our anti hero couldn't be greater, Lucchesini starts in the 1780s when the last war is over and he's a cranky and lonely old man given to repeat himself.) I read Lucchesini's notes - and they're mostly notes - in two versions. Once in the original Italian, which is beyond me (school Latin and school French as well as some months in Italy many years ago left me with some fragmentary Italian, but that's it) but has a German introduction and German footnotes by Gustav B. Volz, and once in a German translation edited together with Catt's diary and those parts from Catt's memoirs actually based on his diary by Fritz Bischof in 1885.

My own notes on Lucchesini's notes, first round, the orignal version:

( Il Re Federico holds forth )

No sooner had I finished reading this that Mildred found a translated-into-German version. The translation selection of Catt's memoirs and diary as well as Lucchesini's diary is edited and published by one Dr. Fritz Bischof in 1885. This enabled me to make notes on interesting to me details I hadn't understood before:

( ...and then we talked about vampires... )