Another poll and a vid

One of the best sources you get for 18th century sensational gossip and character portrats are envoy reports. They're an absolute gold mine, I swear. Of course, the envoys also complain a lot, which made me wonder...

Poll #25818 The Ambassadors' Club

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 21

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My 18th Century Dream Posting would be...

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Paris (Fashion, Literature, Music, Scandal - the best of everything)
1 (4.8%)

St. Petersburg (Future Czarinas to fall in love with! Amazing presents to be had!)
1 (4.8%)

Vienna (Mozart concerts with live Mozart! Pastry!)
4 (19.0%)

Dresden (gorgeous architecture, orgies, luxury)
3 (14.3%)

Venice (Carnival, Vivaldi, Goldoni)
3 (14.3%)

Berlin (post 1740) (as much literature, music and scandal as Paris, but way better hygiene)
1 (4.8%)

The Hague (cleanest European posting to be had! No absolute monarch to coddle!)
3 (14.3%)

London (free press, good music, easy language to learn)
5 (23.8%)

My 18th Century Nightmare Posting would be....

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Paris (often stinks like a pigsty, is expensive, lots of locals are snobs)
0 (0.0%)

St. Petersburg (Czar likes drinking competitions, winter is way too cold)
10 (47.6%)

Vienna (chastity commission WTF?)
0 (0.0%)

Madrid (King sometimes thinks he's a frog, only talks to envoys at night)
0 (0.0%)

Berlin (verbal abuse by monarch almost guaranteed for most of century)
1 (4.8%)

The Hague (anti-gay progrom gets up to 300 men killed)
3 (14.3%)

London (hideously expensive; fox-hunting wtf?)
1 (4.8%)

Ratisbon (boring; everyone argues about ceremony)
1 (4.8%)

Venice (Cholera, STDs, Lead Chambers)
5 (23.8%)

You missed out my 18th Century dream/nightmare posting entirely, which is...

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Salka Viertel, actress, scriptwriter (for Greta Garbo), saloniere, memoirist and activist was a very interesting woman in her own right, and a great portrayer of other interesting people in her memoirs. Her house was a central meeting point for the German-speaking exiles in the 1940s, which is how I first came across her. Here in this videa, she's discussed (in English) with her biographer Donna Rifkind and two German scholars. In between discussions, you get readings from Rifkind's biography about her and from Salka's own memoirs, The Kindness of Strangers. (If I have one criticism, than that the excerpt Rifkind is reading form her own biography right at the beginning describes something which is one of the great tragicomic set pieces in Salka's own book - the birthday party for Heinrich Mann where both brothers Mann with their speeches drove Salka's cook into despair - , and not only is it hard to improve from Salka' s own description (which has become legendary and gets quoted in every book about exiles in L.A.), but it doesn't say something about Salka herself. So if I was Rifkind, I'd have opened with a different excerpt. But that's me nitpicking, and if you haven't heard the story before, it's funny and sad and moving all on the same time, so no objections there, plus the later discussions are definitely Salka-focused. Also? Both the discussion and the readings are filmed in the Villa Aurora, which is the drop gorgeous mansion in Pacific Palisades where my doctoral thesis subject Lion Feuchtwanger spent his last twenty years in.

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