Started to watch the first few episodes of The Great, aka the show starring Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult, written by Tony McNamara. Now it's frank about being a satire and not historical with its "occasionally inspired by a true story" disclaimer, but I'm impressed on how much it tries to be the exact opposite of anything that happened in history from the major stuff down to the smallest insignificant detail. That takes dedication! (And presumably research.) To the degree that I'm startled when anything remotely resembling an actual historical detail shows up, making me believe they're getting sloppy and this happened by accident.

(Some) Examples, some trivial , some not:

1) Catherine's introduction: Show!Catherine (blonde) is from Austria. RL Catherine (brunette) (born Sophie von Anhalt-Zerbst) is from a Prussian client state. Her father is one of Frederick the Great's generals. Austria and Prussia are lethal foes in this period. (Now going by the first three eps, it would have made zero difference to the show's plot if they had given Catherine her actual state of origin, so I can only assume making her Austrian does hail from the show's goal of making their characters the complete opposite of the historical characters.) Show!Catherine is naive about sex and love when arriving; RL Catherine had already been groped by Uncle Bad Touch Georg Wilhelm of Holstein and suspected her mother knew about this. Show Catherine comes alone. RL Catherine with her ultra ambitious mother, Johanna von Holstein. This is quite a plot point in RL Catherine's life (especially the sending away of Johanna later on).

2.) Peter's introduction: Show!Peter is Russian, the show present him as the (surviving) son of Peter the Great. He's never met Catherine before. He's an all powerful Emperor. He has an excentric soap bubbles blowing aunt Elizabeth with zilch political power, and he has mother and father issues. His being an all powerful potentate whose environment has to be sycophantic since they're otherwise dead is key to his show character. RL Peter was German (his Romanow connection was through his mother), born Peter von Holstein-Gottorp, in fact had met Catherine/Sophie (whose mother was a Holstein and his aunt) when they were both children, never quite adjusted to Russia after coming there as an early teen, and had zero political power when teenage Catherine came to Russia a few years later because his aunt, the Tsarina Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, was reigning. E. had adopted him as her successor since she didn't have children of her own (at least not legal ones, there was some gossip about bastards, but nothing ever proven). Peter reigned as Czar/Emperor for six only months before being killed. Before that, he had of course the social power that comes with being a Grand Duke, but in terms of politics, he was also utterly dependent and at the mercy of his aunt, who, having come to power via a coup herself, certainly did not want to share with the next generation.

3.) Show! Catherine's marriage to Peter gets immediately consumated (a lot, if entirely sans affection). RL Catherine and Peter needed 7 years to get there, with their wedding night featuring toy soldiers rather than sex (at least according to Catherine). (All in all, their marriage lasted 18 years.) Show!Catherine makes foes with the local Archbishop (there's just one on the show) almost immediately. RL Catherine, despite being born a Protestant (and her father was pretty hard core about this), managed to endear herself to the Russian Orthodox church almost immediately when in her sickness shortly after arrival she asked for an Orthodox priest instead of the Lutheran pastor her mother offered. (If you side-eye this, you're probably right. Teenage Catherine already knew what was good for her, plus said illness with the request for an Orthodox priest happened before the wedding, at a point when RL Catherine was aware the Czarina Elizabeth could still have sent her back like unwanted goods.

4.) Is the geeky book lover played by Sasha Dhawan supposed to be Catherine's later hard drinking third lover Grigorii Orlov, soldier and no one's intellectual? I don't recognize anyone else's name among the Russian courtiers from RL in the pilot, though later a "Leo" shows up, whose first name could be taken from a rl friend of both Catherine's and her rl second lover, Stanislas Poniatowski. (Poniatowski, btw, definitely was geeky and a bookworm. Among other things.)

5.) Show!Russia is at war with Sweden. Now the show doesn't say when the hell it's supposed to take place (no wonder, given that there were eighteen ears between RL Catherine's wedding and Peter succeeding his aunt as Czar), but at neither point was there war with Sweden. Let alone one started by Peter. The war actually going on when Peter came to power was the Seven Years War, in which Russia, allied with Austria, France and Sweden, fought Prussia (oh, and thus also England, technically, but in rl the English mostly fought the French, while the Russians fought the Prussians.) Since RL Peter was just about the biggest Frederick the Great fanboy ever, he immediately changed alliances and returned conquered Prussian territory. (His generals weren't thrilled.) He also wanted to start a different war (against Denmark, for Holstein territory.) (His generals were even less thrilled.) Since all of this in rl is absolutely key to how Catherine managed to get the Russian military (not into either Prussia or fighting for Holstein goals) on her side, replacing the 7 Years War with a fictional one against Sweden also means the military in this show must have completely different motives. Again, since evidently the show needs to have a war going on for its plot, why replace the one which did happen with one that's invented? Must be that dedication to avoid history at all costs again.

6.)Given that when Sophie/Catherine came to Russia, there was an Empress (Elizabeth) reigning, who had ursurped the throne from a female Regent (Anna Leopoldovna), who had followed another Empress (Anna Ivanova), who had had after a brief Peter II interlude followed the Empress Catherine I. (widow of Peter I. "the Great"), all of which was well known to young Catherine, she really did not need anyone else to tell her female rule was possible in Russia, and you didn't even have to be a Romanov to exert it. (Catherine I. had not been one, either.) I was to compliment the show on its utter avoidance of anything remotely resembling Russian history again when it it backstabbed me in episode 3 by letting possible alternate throne claimant "Ivan" show up as a prisoner whose hiding place only Excentric Aunt Elizabeth knows about. This actually is sort of, kinda, based on something. RL Ivan was the son of the regent Elizabeth had toppled, Anna Leopoldovna (who had been regent for him), a grandnephew of Peter the Great, and he was kept prisoner first by Elizabeth and then Catherine for the rest of his life. (As were his parents; his siblings were finally released and lived out their lives in Denmark.) Show Ivan is Peter the Great's illegtimate son, but still - one can actually see some vague historical origin in this character, I'm shocked.

Now don't get me wrong: given the show is entertaining and funny and all the actors are clearly having a blast, I'll definitely watch the rest of the season, and like I said, as opposed to many an earnest drama which insists on being based on a "true story" while using only a little of it, it is completely honest about its lack of historicity. Fair! But I do wonder: why bother using the names of a few historical people in it at all? Why not going all Ruritania with it and let it be set in an invented place? Because it does feel as if the writer(s) looked at history, said, no, we're not interested in any of this, let's just keep three or four names and make the rest up from scratch. Would the show not have gotten financed if it hadn't been pitched as being about Catherine, is that it?

(Mind you: the one thing no one, neither her enemies (of which she had countless) or her admirers (same) would have said about Catherine II, quondam Sophie von Anhalt-Zerbst, is that her actual life lacked drama or irony. Or colorful contemporaries who'd make a good cast, hence there being countless fictionalisations of her life already.)

One point I can't decide: Is the fact that show!Catherine claims to have met Descartes, in person - when RL Descartes died 70 years before she was born - another part of the show's dedication to be as ahistorical as possible or does it just prove MacNamara is that bad at googling, never mind history?

There’s this lovely old gentleman I know, Edgar Feuchtwanger, nephew of Lion Feuchtwanger the novelist I wrote my thesis about. Edgar F left Germany age 14 as part of the Kindertransport, which probably saved his life. He became a British citizen, married, had children, taught as a historian at Winchester university, published books on various subjects (with a speciality to Victorian times), most recently memoirs of his boyhood. Whenever I visit Britain, I try to see him, and since he still (occasionally, he’s physically fragile now) participates in some conferences on the subject of Lion Feuchtwanger or other exiles, I sometimes see him on these conferences as well. He’s kind, wise, and I only wish that when I age, it will be with his grace and dignity.

Now, because the mail in December isn’t the most reliable, I sent him my present early on. Yesterday, he emailed me to say it arrived safely, and in his mail he also mentioned that he, all his children and their children have just claimed and been granted the German citizenship which in Germany is the right of anyone who lost it due to the Third Reich (and their descendants).

It makes me feel so - I don’t know how. On the one hand, I’m glad he can do this. That he sees Germany today, with all its flaws, as a nation to be citizen of again. On the other hand, the obvious reason why he and his family did this makes me so sad. In the grotesque horror that the Orange Menace spreads, it’s easy to lose sight of the geographically (to me) closer grotesque insanity that is Brexit and the change of mentality in a country whose literature, pop culture, landscapes etc. I’ve always loved, and where I have so many friends. But I relate to Britain as a visitor. For Edgar Feuchtwanger, it was and is home. It was a safe harbor from the worst point of German history. It was where he made a life. And of course his children (all older than yours truly) are as English as they come.

Now Edgar Feuchtwanger is over 90 years old. This is so not how anyone’s life should come full circle.

Moving from fact to fiction (and fictionalized history) again: this review of THE POST, aka Steven Spielberg’s movie about the publication of the Pentagon Papers, mentions that besides the leading duo of Tom Hanks (of course) as Ben Bradlee and Meryl Streep as Katherine Graham, it stars ‬Bob Odenkirk as reporter B.  Bagdikian,  and Matthew Rhys as Daniel Ellsberg. Which means both my inner Better Call Saul and The Americans fan needs to see it. (If either fandom had more fanfiction-writing people in it, I’d expect crazy crossovers, but alas, the tales where a time travelling Saul Goodman/Jimmy McGill works for the Washington Post or Richard Nixon belatedly is proven right by the revelation that Daniel Ellsberg really worked for the KGB won’t be written.

Sidenote I: it wasn’t until yesterday and a certain tweet [Bad username or unknown identity: “likeadeuce”] retweeted that it occured to me Philip and Elizabeth in The Americans have the same names as the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh and might even have been named after them, i.e. their cover identities, on either a Doylist (the producers wanting an in-joke?) or Watsonian (one KGB official in charge felt whimsical) level.

Sidenote II: I saw an interview with Daniel Ellsberg somewhere last week where he mentions it’s odd that Spielberg chose to focus on the WP, when it was the New York Times who did all the work in that particular case, with the Post only coming in at the tail end. The same articles mentioned a few disgruntled NYT veterans who do feel this movie should have been their “All the President’s Men, and why give the glory fo the Post again. At a guess, because Spielberg liked that other movie a lot. And unfortunately, that’s all too often how historical drama (be it movies, tv shows, or theatre) works - people get edited out or reduced to minor roles when in reality they were the major players. (If they don’t get villainized. In Spielberg’s last historical movie, Bridge of Spies, this happened to the German lawyer of the American whose freedom the movie’s hero and his American lawyer, played by Tom Hanks (of course) was negotiating. In Spielberg’s movie, Vogel is a glib and sinister (in turns) Stasi apparatchik. Meanwhile, quoth the real life Frederic Pryor (i.e. the captured American in question): “The portrayal of Wolfgang Vogel, my East German lawyer who was negotiating the communist side, was unfair. They made him out to be a total apparatchik, and one of the villains. He wasn’t. He was a quiet, well-spoken man. The movie made it out to be a political thing, him trying to get the U.S. to publicly recognize the East German government. But it was more a waiting game the East Germans played to show the Russians they had the upper hand. Vogel was actually a very nice guy, whom I later visited several times.") (In this interview.
 
Back to the review of The Post I linked above. Key quote in is 70s nostalgia:
 
An American president who is evil but not stupid. People who publish leaked documents without winding up barricaded in London’s Ecuadorian embassy. People who publish leaked documents without winding up endorsing a president who is evil and stupid. And to add to this gorgeous period detail, Spielberg reproduces some of the characteristic middle-distance sound design and overlapping dialogue of his film work from the 70s.

Says something about the present day, doesn’t it, when the part of the 70s you want back isn’t the music but the non-stupid villains.

Lastly, I still have free slots for themes of your choice to ramble about in January, here.
 
 

Star Trek: Discovery:

Spoilery only for broadcast episodes and theorizing (not knowing) about possible future developments: not to make this entirely about showing off my new self made Discovery icon, regarding a certain theory involving the Klingon character Voq, check out this visual comparison. As I said before, if the theory is correct it would at last provide some justification for the new Klingon look.


It is, alas, real life, not fantasy:

How to follow the Mueller probe (if your only knowledge of US justice comes from tv: I have to say, this is both funny and very useful for those of us across the Atlantic who really do on tv shows and movies for said knowledge. (Am especially gratified that Better Call Saul gets quoted. Mind you, Vince Gilligan and friends would never write a character as grotesque and unrealistic as the Orange Menace.)

In conclusion, I have to use a German joke at least once: Alles Müller oder was?

70 years after the war ended, and you still learn new details that choke you up. Last night I went to a fascinating presentation/panel by two authors, an actress and a moderator about a peculiar detail from the Nuremberg Trials from 1945 - 1948, the Zeugenhaus (literally "house of witnesses"). Seems the Allies, or more specifically the Americans, put witnesses for the trials, both witnesses who had been victims and witnesses who had been active perpetrators (but for some reason or the other weren't among the accused themselves) in the same house. Where they sat at the same table each morning and evening. So you had people who had endured the concentration camps, like Josef Ackermann (a journalist who survived Dachau, Buchenwald and Dora-Mittelbau), having to have dinner with not just Göring's private secretary, Gisela Sonnenfelder (there to testify about her bosses art looting mainly) but the founder and first director of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels.

I mean.

It was a riveting presentation, and afterwards of course someone asked our main author, Christiane Kohl, who wrote about this (her book has already been made into a tv movie which I haven't seen yet), why the hell the first director of the Gestapo wasn't among the prisoners instead of being a wined and dined witness. ("Wined and dined" isn't an exaggaration; as opposed to the rest of the country, where the food situation was what you'd expect it to be in the wake of total destruction, both the witnesses and prisoners in Nuremberg had three to four full meals a day.) She said it was mainly because in 1945, many of the Third Reich documents hadn't been processed or even found - the protocol of the Wannsee Conference, for example, didn't turn up until 1947 -, so the prosecution had to rely on affidavits and living witnesses, and Diels was one of the few Nazi insiders willing to testify for the prosecution - he was referred to as an 1a witness - and swear to the fact that knowledge about the Holocaust hadn't been limited to a very few. Still: it's incredibly galling to imagine that this man due to his testimony not only got away scot free but was working in the Allied administration from 1948 onwards. Afterwards, he was thoroughly enjoying his life, getting a pension, living on an estate, and dying of all the things in a hunting incident. (He had an unsecured gun in the back of his car, the dog jumped on the gun, and that was that.) Actually, he was even enjoying his life during the Nuremberg trials; being good looking, he had many affairs, including with the landlady of the "Zeugenhaus", who was an Hungarian countess put in charge by the Americans because they thought "aristocrats have natural authority". God help us.

No wonder that Josef Ackermann wrote that "I chocked" when seeing this man on the other side of the table. Christiane Kohl says she was first alerted to this bizarre situation when coming across the guest book (yes, there was a guest book) of this house, where the victim witnesses, if they signed, signed solely their names, while the perpetrator witnesses signed with either long sentimental or long self pitying eloges on the note of "in a time when the whole world is against you, it's great that there is one place where you are treated with kindness and dignity". I suppose pragmatically speaking putting them in the same house was probably because with 98% of Nuremberg destroyed in 1945, there weren't that many houses where you could stash a bunch of people, but still. Surely there could have been a different solution that would have spared the victims having to house with Gestapo bosses? At any rate, you wouldn't dare to make something like this up. Reality beats fiction in sheer bizarreness every time.

And on a note of what the hell, world? You may, or may not have seen during the last week lj posts about the way the New York Times saw fit to report the gang rape of a eleven years old girl. (Victim blaming abounded.) Now I've come about an online article reporting in more detail and depth about the circumstances. It also links a video from a local news report in which the mother of one of the boys/men (he's 19) is interviewed, and quotes from said interview.

...I'm usually adverse to the whole "blame the parents" approach. Especially with rape. And it must be a horrible situation, finding out your child has done something like that. But if you raise your son along these lines:

FOX 26: What did you do? Did you talk to your son?

Hancock: Yes I did. Yes I did. I said, ‘Baby, I’m your momma. You can talk to me.’ (The victim) said she was 17 years old and that’s what he told me.

FOX 26: But Anita, a lot of people would say, ‘This is an 11 year old child. Even if she lied, she’s eleven.’

Hancock: I understand that. I understand that. I’m not defending him. I’m not defending her. I’m not defending no child because if it were my child, I would feel the same way. My point is, where was her mother?

FOX 26: If this was reversed. If your son wasn’t your son, but you were the mother of this 11 year old, what would you do? What would you say? What is justice?

Hancock: First of all, I would know where she was. That’s the justice. Not knowing where your baby is is not justice. I feel like she should be accounted for not knowing where your baby at.

FOX 26: What lesson does you son need to learn?

Hancock: ID. Identification. This (holding up nametag and picture) is what you ask for baby.

FOX 26: So you’re going to tell your son, next time he meets a girl to ask for her ID?

Hancock: Identification.

...the you are also responsible. "Identification?" Seriously? IDENTIFICATION?

Talk about rape culture.