Friedrich August Stüler Puns

On one hand, we've got the son who didn't get a kingdom at all, embezzled public funds from food that kept Germany from starving in the Weltkrieg and during the dictatorship, wasn't supported at all by his own family, got a divorce, supported the far-right of the DVLP, had to resign from a religious order, and once got his troops mistaken for the enemy. On the other hand, we got August IV, who also divorced his wife, is rumored to be gay, probably supports the far right despite that, reigns as a constitutional monarch allowing Poland to slip away from Germany, despite possibly being far right as well, got a kingdom just to be sent as away from Germany, alongside the fact he likes jewelry and painting.

Excerpt from the Sixth Nightwatch of Bonaventura, the title was chosen by Jackiw (RIP). Elsewhere, the episode is simply called "Doomsday" or "judgement day". This translation published in The German Mind of the Nineteenth Century: a Literary and Historical Anthology, edited by Hermann Glaser (Continuum, 1981). Complete English editions: Gerald Gillespie (annotated translation first published as a parallel text for the academics in the early 1970's, rediscovered in 2014 thanks to an English-only reprint from the University of Chicago Press), and Elmar Theodore Theissen (free thesis, downloadable here, submitted by a UBC grad student in 1973; a little plainer in style, more informal/chatty than Gillespie or Jackiw):

> The anonymous Nightwatches of Bonaventura (probably written by Ernst August Friedrich Klingemann, 1777-1831), published in 1804, assumes a counterposition to the religiously expectant Baroque and to the rationally affirmative Enlightenment. A poet, who, ironizing the "creative hours" of the night, has become a nightwatchman, narrates his life in sixteen installments of exciting confessions, including observations of other people's lives. As a bitterly disappointed idealist, he behaves as if he were a grim prankster who sees behind the facades of human vanity and unmasks man's mendacity. In the end the titanic questioner hears a threefold nothing sounded at his father's grave: "I don't see you any more, Father. Where are you? Upon contact everything disintegrates into ashes, only a handful of dust is still lying on the ground, and a few well-fed worms crawl past like moral eulogizers who have overeaten at the funeral repast. I scatter this handful of paternal dust into the air and it remains--nothing! Over there on the grave there still stands the seer and embraces--nothing! And the echo in the charnel house one last time calls out-- nothing!" > > * * * > > What would I not give to be able to tell my tale as straightforwardly and coherently as other honorable protestant writers and journalists, who grow fat and rich in doing so and exchange their golden thoughts for golden realities! But I simply have not the gift, and my short simple tale of murder has cost me enough sweat and tears, and still looks amply checkered and confused. > > I was unfortunately already spo