The act of matriculation at Bonn meant to young William many things
apart from the beginning of a university career. In fact, it was almost
a sign of his emancipation from academic studies. He was a student
among students in only a formal sense. The theory of a complete civic
education was respected by his attendance at certain lectures, and by
his perfunctory compliance with sundry university regulations. But, in
reality, he now belonged to the army. He had attained his majority, like
other Prussian princes, at the age of eighteen, and thereupon had been
given his Second Lieutenant’s commission in the First Foot Regiment of
the Guards, where his father had been trained before him. The routine of
his military service, and the exigencies of the martial education which
now supplanted all else, kept him much more in Berlin than at Bonn.
Both at the Prussian capital and Rhenish university town he now wore his
uniform, his sword, and his epaulets, and, chin well in air, sniffed his
fill of the incense burned before him by the young men of the army. The
glitter and colour of the parade ground, the peremptory discipline,
the sense of power given by these superb wheeling lines and walls of
bayonets and exact geometrical movements as of some mighty machine,
fascinated his imagination. He threw himself into military work with
feverish eagerness. Pacific Cassel, with its gymnasium and the kindly
figure of the tutor, Hinzpeter, faded away into a remote memory of
childhood.
Public events, meanwhile, had been working out a condition of affairs
which gave a marked importance to this change in William’s character.
The German peoples, having got over the first rapt enthusiasm at
beholding their ancient Frankish enemy rolled in the dust at their
feet, and at finding themselves once more all together under an imperial
German flag, began to devote attention to domestic politics. It was high
time that they did so.
Prussia had roared as gently as any sucking dove the while the question
was still one of enticing the smaller German States into the federated
empire. But once the Emperor-King felt his footing secure upon the
imperial throne, the old hungry Hohenzollern blood began stirring in his
veins. His great Chancellor, Prince Bismarck, needed no prompting; every
fibre of his bulky frame responded intuitively to this inborn Prussian
instinct of aggrandisement. Together these two began putting the screws
upon the minor States. “Solidifying the Empire” was what they called
their work. The Hohenzollerns were always notable “solidifiers,” as
their neighbours have had frequent occasion to observe tearfully during
the last three centuries.
The humiliation and expulsion of Austria had been the pivot upon which
the creation of the new Germany turned. In its most obvious aspect
this had appeared to all men to be the triumph of a Protestant over
a Catholic power. Later events had contributed to associate Prussia’s
ascendency with the religious issue. The great OEcumenical Council at
Rome had been followed by a French declaration of war, which every good
Lutheran confidently ascribed to the dictation of the Jesuits.
These things grouped themselves together in the public mind just as
similar arguments did in England in the days of the Armada. To be a
Catholic grew to seem synonymous with being a sympathizer with Austria
and France. It is an old law of human action that if you persistently
impute certain views to a man, and persecute him on account of them, the
effect is to reconcile his mind to those views. The melancholy history
of theologico-political quarrels is peculiarly filled with examples of
this. The Catholics of Germany were in the main as loyal to the idea of
imperial unity as their Protestant neighbours, and they had shed their
blood quite as freely to establish it as a fact. Their bishops and
priests had over and over again testified by deeds their independence
of Rome in matters which affected them as Germans. But when they found
Bismarck ceaselessly insisting that they were hostile to Prussia, it was
natural enough that they should discover that they did dislike his kind
of a Prussia, and that some of the least cautious among them should say
so.
Prussia’s answer--coming with the promptness of deliberate
preparation--was the _Kulturkampf_, Into the miserable chaos which
followed we need not go. Bishops were exiled or imprisoned; schools
were broken up and Catholic professors chased from the universities;
a thousand parishes were bereft of their priests; the whole empire was
filled with angry suspicions, recriminations, and violence, hot-tempered
roughness on one side, grim obstinacy of hate on the other--to the joy
of all Germany’s enemies outside and the confusion of all her friends.
Despotism begets lawlessness, and Bismarck and old William, busy with
their priest hunt, suddenly discovered that out of this disorder had
somehow sprouted a strange new thing called Socialism. They halted
briefly to stamp this evil growth out--and lo! from an upper window
of the beer house on Unter den Linden, called the Three Ravens, the
Socialist Nobiling fired two charges of buckshot into the head and
shoulders of the aged Emperor, riddling his helmet like a sieve and
laying him on a sick bed for the ensuing six months.
As a consequence, the Crown Prince Frederic was installed as Regent from
June till December of 1878, and from this period dates young William’s
public attitude of antagonism to the policy of his parents.
For the present we need examine this only in its outer and political
phases. It is too much, perhaps, to say that heretofore there had been
no divisions inside the Hohenzollern family. The Crown Prince and his
English wife had been in tacit opposition to the Kaiser-Chancellor
_régime_ for many years. But this opposition took on palpable form and
substance during the Regency of 1878.
A new Pope--the present Leo XIII--had been elected only a few
months before, and with him the Regent Frederic opened a personal
correspondence, with a view to compromising the unhappy religious
wrangles which were doing such injury to Germany. The letters written
from Berlin were models of gentle firmness and wise statesmanship, and
they laid a foundation of conciliatory understanding upon which Bismarck
afterward gladly reared his superstructure of partial settlement when
the time came for him to need and bargain for the Clerical vote in the
Reichstag. But at the time their friendly tone gave grave offence to the
Prussian Protestants, and was peculiarly repugnant to the Junker court
circles of Berlin.
It is no pleasant task to picture to one’s self the grief and chagrin
with which the Regent and his wife must have noted that their elder son
ranged himself among their foes. The change which had been wrought in
him during the year in the regiment and at Bonn revealed itself now
in open and unmistakable fashion. Prince William ostentatiously joined
himself with those who criticised the Regent. He assiduously cultivated
the friendship of the men who led hostile attacks upon his parents.
He had his greatest pride in being known for a staunch supporter of
Bismarck, a firm believer in divine right, Protestant supremacy, and all
the other catchwords of the absolutist party. The praises which these
reactionary people sang in his honour mounted like the fumes of spirits
to his young brain. Instinctively he began posing as the Hope of the
Monarchy--as the providential young prince, handsome, wise and strong,
who was in good time to ascend the throne and gloriously undo all
that the weak dreamer, his father, had done toward liberalizing the
institutions of Prussia and Germany.
A lamentable and odious attitude this, truly! Yet, which of us was
wholly wise at nineteen? And which of us, it may be added fairly, has
encountered such magnificent and overpowering temptations to foolishness
as these that beset young William?
Remember that all his associates, alike in his daily routine with his
regiment or at the University and in his larger intercourse among
the aristocratic social circles of Berlin, took only one view of this
subject. At their head were Bismarck, the most powerful and impressive
personality in Europe, and the aged Emperor, the one furiously
inveighing against the manner in which the Protestant religion and
political security were being endangered, the other deploring from his
sick-bed the grievous inroads which were threatened upon the personal
rights and prerogatives of the Hohenzollerns.
It is not strange that young William adopted the opinion of his
grandfather and of Bismarck, chiming as it did with the new impulses of
militarism that had risen so strongly within him, and being re-echoed,
as it was, from the lips of all his friends.
But the event of this brief Regency which most clearly marked the
chasm separating the Crown Prince from the Junker circles of his son’s
adoption, was the appointment of Dr. Friedberg to high office. And this
is particularly worth studying, because its effects are still felt in
German social and political life.
Dr. Friedberg was then a man of sixty-five, and one of the most
distinguished jurists of Germany. He had adorned a responsible post in
the Ministry of Justice for over twenty years, and had written numerous
valuable works, those relating to his special subject of prison reform
and the efficacy of criminal law in social improvement standing in the
very front rank of literature of that kind. His promotion, however,
had been hopelessly blocked by two considerations; he was professedly a
Liberal in politics and a close friend of the Crown Prince and Princess,
and, what was still worse, he was a Jew.
On the second day of his Regency, Frederic astounded and scandalized
aristocratic Berlin by appointing Dr. Friedberg to the highest
judicial-administrative post in the kingdom. To glance forward for a
moment, it may be noted that when old Kaiser Wilhelm returned to active
power in December, he refused to remove Friedberg, out of a feeling
of loyalty to his son’s actions as Regent. But he vented his wrath in
another way by conspicuously neglecting to give Friedberg the Black
Eagle after he had served nine years in the Ministry, though all his
associates obtained the decoration upon only six years’ service. This
slight upon the Hebrew Minister explains the well-remembered action of
Frederic, when he was on his journey home from San Remo to ascend the
throne after his father’s death:--as the Ministerial delegation met his
train at Leipsic, and entered the carriage, he took the Black Eagle from
his own neck and placed it about that of Friedberg.
This action of the emotional sick man, returning through the March
snowstorm to play his brief part of phantom Kaiser, created much talk in
Germany three years ago, and Friedberg, upon the strength of it, plumed
himself greatly as the chief friend of the new monarch. He was the first
Jew ever decorated by that exalted and exclusive Black Eagle--and during
the short reign of ninety-nine days he held himself like the foremost
man in the Empire.
It is a melancholy reflection that this mean-spirited old man, as soon
as Frederic died, made haste to lend himself to the work of blackening
his benefactor’s memory. He had owed more to Frederic’s friendship and
loyalty than any other in Germany, and he requited the debt to the dead
Kaiser with such base ingratitude that even Frederic’s enemies were
disgusted, and, under the pressure of general disfavour, he had soon to
quit his post. But enough of Friedberg’s unpleasant personality. Let us
return to 1878.
The Regent’s action in giving Prussia a Jewish Minister lent an enormous
original impulse to the anti-Semitic movement in Berlin, which soon grew
into a veritable _Judenhetze_. This Jewish question, while it ran its
course of excitement in Germany, completely dwarfed the earlier clerical
issue, just as it in turn has been submerged by the rising tide of
Socialistic agitation. But though the anti-semitic party has ceased to
exert any power at the polls the feeling back of it is still a potent
factor in Berlin life.
In the new Berlin, of which I shall speak presently, the Jews occupy
a more commanding and dominant position than they have ever had in any
other important city since the fall of Jerusalem. For this the Germans
have themselves largely to blame. The military bent of the ascendant
Prussians has warped the whole Teutonic mind toward unduly glorifying
the army. The prizes of German upper-class life are all of a military
sort. Every nobleman’s son, every bright boy in the wealthier citizens’
stratum, aspires to the uniform. The tacit rule which excludes the Jews
from positions in this epauletted aristocracy drives them into the other
professions. They may not wear the sword: they revenge themselves by
owning the vast bulk of the newspapers, by writing most of the books, by
almost monopolizing law, medicine, banking, architecture, engineering,
and the more intellectual branches of the civil service.
This preponderance of Hebrews in the liberal professions seems unnatural
to the Tory German, who has vainly tried to break it down by political
action and by social ostracism. These attempts in turn have thrown the
Jews into opposition. Of the seven Israelites in the present Reichstag
six are Socialist Democrats and one is a Freisinnige leader. Every paper
in Germany owned or edited by a Jew is uncompromisingly Radical in its
politics. This in turn further exasperates the German Tories and keeps
alive the latent fires of hatred which bigots like Stocker from time to
time fan into flame.
In finance, too, the German aristocrats find themselves getting more and
more helplessly into Jewish hands. Their wonderful new city of Berlin
not only acts as a sieve for the great wave of Hebrew migration steadily
moving westward from Russia, but it is becoming the Jewish banking and
money centre of Europe. The grain trade of Russia is concentrated in
Berlin. To buy wheat from Odessa you apply to one of the three hundred
Jewish middleman firms at Berlin. To borrow money in Europe you go with
equal certainty to Berlin. The German nobleman was never very rich; he
has of late years become distinctly poor--and all the mortgages which
mar his sleep o’ nights are locked in Jewish safes at Berlin.
To revenge himself the German aristocrat can only assume an added
contempt for literature and the peaceful professions generally because
they are Jewish; insist more strongly than ever that the army is the
only place for German gentlemen because it is not Jewish, and dream of
the time when a beneficent fate shall once more hand Jerusalem over to
conquest and rapine.
This German nobleman, however, does not disdain in the meanwhile to
lend himself to the spoliation of the loathed tribes when chance offers
itself. There is a famous Jewish banker in Berlin, who, in his senile
years, is weak enough to desire social position for his children. One
of his sons, a stupid and debauched youngster, is permitted to associate
with sundry fashionable German officers--just up to the point where
he loses his money to them with sufficient regularity--and, of course,
never gets an inch beyond that point.
A daughter of this old banker had an even more disastrous experience.
She was an ugly girl, but with her enormous dower the ambitious parents
were able to buy a titled husband in the person of a penniless German
Baron. Delighted with this success, the banker settled upon the couple a
handsome estate in Silesia, The Baron and his bride were provided with
a special train to convey them to their future home, and in that very
train the Baron installed his mistress, and with her a lawyer friend
who had already arranged for the sale of the estate. The Jewish bride
arrived in Silesia to find herself contemptuously deserted by her
husband and robbed of her estate. She returned to Berlin, obtained
a divorce, and as soon as might be was married again--this time to a
diamond merchant of her own race.
As for the Baron who perpetrated this unspeakably brutal and callous
outrage, I did not learn that he had lost caste among his friends by the
exploit. Indeed, the story was told to me as a merry joke on the Jews.
Prince Bismarck, almost alone among the Junker group, did not associate
himself with this anti-Semitic agitation. In the work which he was
carrying forward Jewish bankers were extremely useful. Both in a visibly
regular way, and by subterranean means, capitalists like Bleichroder
played a most important part in his performance of the task of
centralizing power at Berlin. Hence he always held aloof from the
movement against the Jews, and on occasions made his dislike for it
manifest.
Doubtless it was his counsel which restrained the impetuous young
William from openly identifying himself with this bigoted and
proscriptive demonstration. At all events, the youthful Prince avoided
any overt sign of his sympathy with the anti-Jewish outcry, yet
continued to find all his friends among the class which supported the
_Judenhetze_. It seems a curious fact now that in those days he created
the impression of a silent and reserved young man--almost taciturn.
As to where his likes and dislikes lay, no uncertainty existed. He was
heart and soul with the aristocratic Court party and against all the
tendencies and theories of the small academic group attached to his
father. He made this obvious enough by his choice of associations, but
kept a dignified curb on his tongue.
In addition to his course of studies at Bonn and his practical labours
with his regiment, the Prince devoted a set amount of time each week to
instruction of a less common order. He had regular weekly appointments
with two very distinguished professors--the Emperor William, who spoke
on Kingcraft, and Chancellor Bismarck, whose theme was Statecraft. The
former series of discourses was continued almost without intermission,
even during the old Kaiser’s period of retirement after Nobiling’s
attempt on his life. The Prince saw these eminent instructors regularly,
but it did not enter into their scheme of education that he should
profess to learn anything from his father.
Among the ideas which the impressionable young man imbibed from Bismarck
there could be nothing calculated to increase his filial affection or
respect. Bismarck had cherished a bitter dislike for the English
Crown Princess, conceived even before her marriage, at a time when
she represented to him only the girlish embodiment of an impolitic
matrimonial alliance, and strengthened year by year after she came to
Berlin to live. He did not scruple to charge to a conspiracy between her
and the Empress Augusta all the political obstacles which from time to
time blocked his path. He not only believed, but openly declared, that
the Crown Princess was responsible for the whole Arnim episode; and it
is an open secret that even the State papers emanating from the German
Foreign Office during his Chancellorship contain the grossest and most
insulting allusions to her. As for the Crown Prince, Bismarck was at no
pains to conceal his contempt for one of whom he habitually thought as a
henpecked husband.
Enough of this feeling about his parents must have filtered through into
young William’s mind, from his intercourse with the powerful Chancellor,
to render any reassertion of parental influence impossible.
In the summer of 1880 the Emperor and his Chancellor decided that it
was time for their pupil to marry, and they selected for his bride an
amiable, robust and comely-faced German princess of the dispossessed
Schleswig-Holstein family. I gain no information anywhere as to
William’s parents having been more than formally consulted in this
matter--and no hint that William himself took any deep personal interest
in the transaction. The marriage ceremony came in February of 1881, and
William was now installed in a residence of his own--the pretty little
Marble Palace at Potsdam. His daily life remained otherwise unaltered.
He worked hard at his military and civil tasks, and continued to
pose--not at all through mere levity of character, but inspired by a
genuine, if misguided, sense of duty--as the darling of all reactionary
elements in modern Germany.