The opening month of 1889 was a momentous period in the history of the
young Emperor. The decoration of Puttkamer, who stood in all eyes as
a type of the late Kaiser’s bitterest and most malignant foes, put the
finishing touch to the demonstrative unfilial stage of William’s career.
Men had been brought by this deed to think as badly of him as they
could--when lo! the whole situation suddenly changed. This crowning
act of affront to his father’s memory was also the last. From that very
month it is a new William who presents himself for consideration.
It is not possible to put the finger upon any one special cause for the
change in the Kaiser’s views and feelings which from this time began to
manifest itself. There were in truth many reasons working together to
effect this alteration, at once so subtle and so swift.
In its essence the abrupt new departure was due to the awakened
consciousness in William’s mind that the Bismarcks had been making a
fool of him. Royalty can bear any calamity better than this. The
saying ascribed to Louis XVIII, “For the love of God, do not render me
ridiculous!” puts into words the thought that has lain closest to every
monarch’s heart since kings have had a being. And it was in William’s
nature to regard himself and his position with exceptional seriousness.
It would be extremely interesting to follow the mental processes by
which William all at once reached this realizing sense of his position,
and saw how poor and contemptible a figure he had been made to cut in
the eyes of the civilized world. As it is, we can only glance briefly at
the more obvious of the causes which led to this welcome awakening.
First of all, the High Court of Leipsic, on January 4th, threw out the
indictment which Bismarck had been so savagely pressing against Dr.
Geffcken, for the treasonable publication of a part of the Emperor
Frederic’s diary. The official ransacking of all his correspondence,
and that of his most intimate associates, had revealed nothing save
additional proof that the late Princess Alice of Hesse, Sir Robert
Morier, and Dr. Geffcken were close friends of Frederic and his
wife--which, of course, everybody knew before, but which the Bismarckian
journals had paraded afresh as a reason for new insults to the dead
Kaiser’s memory and to the widowed Empress Frederic. The prompt adverse
decision of the court dealt a sharp blow to this scandalous abuse of
power.
In addition, the Bismarcks were meanwhile conducting a fierce public
campaign against Sir Robert Morier, the British Ambassador at St.
Petersburg--or rather, through him, against the honour of the late
Emperor. Their accusation, based upon some alleged verbal statement of
Marshal Bazaine, made at a time when he was most hopelessly discredited
and new in exile, was that Frederic had systematically revealed the
secrets of the German Army plans to Morier, who had sent them to England
to be wired across to France. When Sir Robert Morier produced Bazaine’s
written denial of the alleged utterances and sent it to Herbert
Bismarck, with a polite request for a withdrawal of the odious charge,
he received a letter of refusal, couched in grossly insulting terms.
This controversy, culminating about the time of the collapse of the
Geffcken prosecution, no doubt contributed much to the opening of
William’s eyes.
There were not wanting at Berlin clever people ready to take advantage
of these foolish excesses of the arrogant and over-confident Bismarcks.
Their arbitrary and despotic courses had offended many besides those who
would naturally be opposed to them politically, and there now sprang
up, as out of the earth, a singular combination of the most diverse
political elements, united only in their hatred for the Bismarcks. In
this incongruous alliance Radicals and Jew-baiters joined hands, and
ultra-Conservatives stood side by side with the Empress Frederic’s
Liberal faction. The headquarters of this odd combination were at the
residence of Alfred Count von Waldersee.
This powerful personage, who for years, as Quartermaster-General, was in
training as Moltke’s visible heir, and was until recently at the head
of the greatest fighting machine the human race ever saw, is still but
little known to the general public. This is because press popularity and
interesting personal qualities and connections have nothing whatever
to do with a man’s promotion in the German Army. Heroic actions on the
field advance him no more than does the advertising faculty in times
of peace. He rises to each place because he is judged to be fittest
for that particular post, and this judgment sternly sets aside all
considerations not immediately concerned with the duties of that post.
Thus it happens that of Count von Waldersee, who is one of the most
important military officers in the world, not much is known save that he
is now grey and bald, and has for his wife a very astute and influential
American lady.
Twenty-seven years ago an elderly prince of the Schleswig-Holstein
family produced a temporary sensation by renouncing his ancestral rank,
in order to marry a beautiful young Miss Lee, whom he had met at Paris.
He was then just the age of the century--sixty-four--and the bride,
who, with true American courage, states the year of her birth in
the _Almanach de Gotha_, was twenty-six. Less than a year later the
bridegroom, who had been given the title of Prince de Noër at the
Austrian Court, died in Syria. Nine years afterwards--in 1874--his widow
married Count Waldersee, and went to Berlin to live.
It happened, in 1881, that young Prince William of Prussia was wedded
to a Schleswig-Holstein Princess, to whom the Countess Waldersee, by her
first marriage, stood in the relation of great-aunt. Young William and
Waldersee were already friends. This connection between their wives
led to a closer intimacy, the results of which have been tremendous in
Germany.
I have said that the home of the Waldersees now became the centre of the
rising opposition to the Bismarcks. Count Waldersee himself represented
the ancient Prussian nobles’ traditions of an absolute monarchy and a
Hohenzollern’s unlimited kingly power--traditions which were all at war
with this Bismarckian usurpation of authority. The Countess Waldersee,
with the privilege of an American, was able to gather into association
with this aristocratic conservatism many elements in German
political life which, under any other roof than hers, would have been
antagonistic. Here it was that the women’s conclave was formed--the
young Empress Victoria and her widowed mother-in-law, the Empress
Frederic, joining hands with the Countess Waldersee--with the blessing
of the aged Empress Augusta, who all her life long had hated Bismarck,
resting upon their work.
Bismarck had been supreme for so many years, and had put so many of
these feminine cabals under his feet in bygone days, that he failed to
recognize the deadly peril which confronted him in this newly-unmasked
battery. He proceeded to charge upon it with all his old recklessness
of confidence, and with his accustomed weapons of newspaper insults,
personal browbeatings and threats to resign. To his great bewilderment
nothing gave way. He had come at last upon a force greater than himself.
He maintained the struggle for over a year--scornfully at first, and
later with a despairing tenacity as pitiful as it was undignified, until
at last he was fairly cudgeled off the field.
This was the trick of it: Bismarck, in all his extended series of
conquests over previous attacks by the women of the Court, had had the
King at his back. He was supported by old William in his long campaign
against the old Empress and the English Crown Princess. He had had the
sanction of young William in his warfare upon the Empress Frederic. It
had been with royal consent that he bore himself like the foremost man
in Prussia, and he had allowed himself to forget the importance of
this fact. The tables were completely turned upon him the instant these
adroit and sagacious women whispered in young William’s ear, “Why not be
foremost man in Prussia yourself?”
The young Kaiser’s thirtieth birthday came on January 27, 1889. We can
put down to about that date his advance to an independent position in
front of everybody else in his kingdom--including the Bismarcks. No
single striking event marked the change; but the feeling that the change
had come spread with strange swiftness throughout the length and breadth
of Germany. The half-intuitive sense that Bismarck was done for ran like
wildfire over the country. The Iron Chancellor for thirty years had
done his best to reduce German manhood to the serf-like condition of the
courtier, and it is proverbial that there is no other keenness of scent
like that of courtiers for the fall of a favourite.
The open reconciliation between William and his mother belongs to a
somewhat later period, but the spirit of it was already in the air. The
terrible news of the death of Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria, which
came on January 30th, is also to be taken into account as bearing upon
this change at Berlin. The Austrian heir-apparent was only six months
older than William, and of late years they had not been friends. Rudolph
had been peculiarly intimate with the Prince of Wales and with the late
Emperor Frederic, and had not concealed his sympathy with the English
view of William’s behaviour. His tragic ending now produced the most
painful and softening effect upon the emotional young Kaiser. He could
only be restrained from going _incognito_ to the funeral at Vienna by
the urgent pleas of the stricken Austrian Emperor, and he made obviously
sincere expressions of grief to the friends of the Prince of Wales,
which went far toward removing the ill-feelings between them.
As it became apparent that the young Kaiser had thrown off his
Bismarckian leading-strings, and, after a miserable interlude of small
personal persecutions and revenges, was at last coming to comprehend the
vastness of his duties and responsibilities, the world began watching
him with an interest of another sort.
It was not easy for outsiders to follow with much clearness the details
of the fight which Bismarck was now making to retain his position and
prestige. No one but a German politician could understand the excitement
about the appointment of the National Liberal, von Bennigsen, to the
Governorship of Hanover--an act, by the way, which definitely ranged
the ultra-Tories against Bismarck--or apprehend the significance of
Bismarck’s fruitless attempts to secure the dismissal of Court Chaplain
Stocker, who was too much a partisan of Waldersee’s. The general
public preferred rather to study the personality of the young Kaiser as
revealed by his individual acts and utterances.
William’s fondness for travelling had from the first attracted
attention. It is not generally known that in order to gratify this taste
he at the beginning of his reign decided to devote to it the money
which would be saved by foregoing a coronation ceremony. This decision
accorded with historic Prussian precedents. From the year 1701, when
Prussia was raised to royal estate, and the first King was crowned with
such memorable and costly pomp at Königsberg, no Hohenzollern had a
coronation ceremony until William I put the crown upon his own head in
October of 1861. Each of the intervening monarchs held instead what
is called a _Hudligung_, or solemn homage from the assembled
representatives of the estates of the realm--a curious ceremonial relic
from feudal times which survived into the present century in its antique
form as a public function in the Schloss Platz. William I’s avowed
reason for breaking over the rule was that during his predecessor’s
reign a Constitution had been promulgated in Prussia, and that this
new-fangled innovation rendered it necessary to remind people anew of
the powers and prerogatives of the monarch by visible signs of crown and
sceptre.
Young William was so enthusiastic a follower of his grandfather that
people assumed he would imitate him in this, all the more because his
own tastes are toward display. Upon this theory there has been a great
deal printed about a forthcoming coronation which never comes. Only
last year an unusually impressive statement appeared to the effect that
William, moved by meditating upon the historic splendours of the old
Holy Roman Empire, intended to have himself crowned German Emperor
in the famous mediaeval church of the ancient imperial city of
Frankfort-on-the-Main. The idea is a beautiful one, but there is no fact
at the back of it. According to William’s present intention, he will not
be crowned at all.
In the restless course of his travels during these first six months
William had made numerous speeches, almost every one of which contained
a sentence or two of enough significance to be reprinted everywhere.
As a rule his utterances at foreign Courts were polite and amiable to
a fault, while his speeches at home, made among cheering after-dinner
audiences in various parts of Germany, were characterized by much
violent extravagance of language. The most intemperate of these
harangues were reserved for his State visits to the provincial divisions
of Prussia. At the beginning of last year, on the occasion of a visit
of this nature to Königsberg, capital of East Prussia, he was led by
his enthusiasm into so fervid a strain of eloquence, and flourished
the metaphorical sword so recklessly, that one of the Russian papers
ironically congratulated the world upon the fact that Prussia only had
thirteen provinces, and that the Kaiser had now exhausted the rhetorical
possibilities of eleven of them.
The earliest and most interesting of these speeches was delivered at
Frankfurt-am-Oder just two months after his accession. He referred of
his own volition to the undoubtedly foolish talk that had been heard
during his father’s brief reign, of Frederic’s alleged idea of giving
back Alsace-Lorraine, an imputation which William characterized as
shameful to his father’s memory.
“There is upon this point but one mind,” he went on amid loud hurrahs,
“namely, that our eighteen army corps, and our 42,000,000 people should
be left upon the field rather than that we should permit a solitary
stone of what we have gained to be taken from us.”
Equally characteristic, and perhaps even more important as a clue to the
manner in which the young Kaiser’s conceptions of his position shaped
themselves, was his celebrated rebuke to the Burgomaster and municipal
authorities of Berlin, which has for its date, October 28 1888. That we
may the better comprehend this, it will be well to glance for a moment
at the remarkable development of the new Berlin.
Twenty years ago--that is to say, when the Empire was founded--Berlin
was of course much the largest city within the new German boundaries,
but it was scarcely a capital in the sense that Paris, Vienna, or London
is. Frankfurt-am-Main was the great banking centre of Germany; Hamburg
was its commercial metropolis; Dresden, Hanover, Stuttgart, Wiesbaden,
and even smaller towns were more esteemed as places of fashionable
residence and resort. Berlin was big and powerful, and rich in
manufactures, no doubt, but nobody thought of it as beautiful or
attractive, and nobody wanted to live there who could maintain himself
in pleasanter surroundings.
The change which has been wrought in all this since 1870 is only to be
matched by the phenomenal growth of great cities in the American West.
Europe has seen nothing like it before. Within these twenty years Berlin
has grown like a veritable Chicago. And not only has it attracted to
itself hundreds of thousands of new citizens, and spread itself out on
the Brandenburg plain over new square miles of stately brick and mortar
and asphalt, but it has sapped the pre-eminence of its more ancient
rivals, each in its speciality. Berlin has so absorbed the monetary
power of the Empire that Frankfort is now scarcely thought of as
a banking centre at all, and even Amsterdam and Paris are dwarfed
financially. In similar fashion, the German nobility and wealthy
classes, instead of scattering their town homes among a dozen local
centres of social life, swarm now all to Berlin, and bid so strenuously
for available building sites that prices for land and houses and floor
rents are higher there than anywhere else in Europe.
Obviously, it is the establishment of the imperial Court in Berlin which
has done this, and both the strength and weakness of the imperial system
are reflected in greatest perfection of form and colour in the social
conditions of this mighty new metropolis.
The enormous concentration here of rich or pretentious young nobles
in the various regiments of the Guard Corps; of the ablest and most
influential soldiers of Germany in the General Staff and the central
military offices; of the cleverest politicians and administrators in
the various civic departments, and of the great aristocratic and monied
classes who must live where the Court is settled and the Reichstag
meets and the finance of Europe is controlled--all this makes Berlin
a peculiarly responsive mirror of the ideas and methods of German
government.
In turn Berlin has imposed its character with increasing force upon
the whole German people. The dear old indolent, amiable, incapable,
happy-go-lucky, waltz-loving Vienna used to be the type of what people
had in mind when they spoke of the sentimental German. Berlin has made
Vienna seem now as remote and non-German almost as Pesth itself, and
instead has impressed its own strongly-marked individuality upon the new
Empire--energetic, exact, harsh under slight provocation, methodical
as the multiplication table, coldly just to law-abiding people, and a
fire-and-steel terror to everybody else.
As might be naturally expected in this bustle of busy officials, of
bankers and merchants burdened with a novel wealth, of the ceaseless
rattle of bayonets and clatter of swords and spurs, art and literature
are pretty well pushed to the wall. The vast new growth of Berlin and
the rush toward it of German wealth, rank, and fashion, have drawn in
their train a certain current of painters and writers, but nothing
at all in proportion with the expansion in other lines of activity.
Berlin’s new supremacy has not affected Leipsic as the book centre of
German-speaking people, or Munich and Düsseldorf as homes of art study.
These changes may come, too, in time, particularly if the young Emperor
exerts himself to achieve such an end. Up to the present, he has been
too busy even to think of such a thing. The exactions of his daily
routine of labour are so great that he simply has no time for the softer
and more intellectual side of life, even if the taste were there. He has
found leisure to sit for several portraits since his accession, but that
seems to have been the sum of his attention to art. As for literature,
an observant official in Berlin assured me of his conviction that
William had not had the time to read a single book since his accession.
Whatever may come in the future, it is undeniable that the author
now cuts a poor figure in Berlin. The city’s drift is toward material
things--toward business, official rank, and martial perfection. Even the
most prosperous and popular writers of books in Berlin strive to
obtain some small post in the civil service in order to command social
position. Among many instances of this brought to my notice one will
serve as an illustration. Ernst von Wilderbruch is the most successful
of contemporary Berlin playwrights, but on his card you will read that
he is a Counsellor of Legation at the Foreign Office. This office yields
him a salary equal to a twentieth part of his income from his plays,
but it is of the greatest importance to him because it insures his rank.
Here in England Edmund Gosse has an official place--just as in Boston
Robert Grant holds a post in the municipal service. But can you fancy
either of these gentlemen putting the fact on his card, or preferring to
be known as an official rather than as a writer?
Even the splendid University of Berlin exerts a liberalizing influence
rather through the public political attitude of its professors than
by the diffusion of literary tastes among the community. This fact,
together with the recollections which associate the late Emperor
Frederic with bookish people, and the irritated consciousness that
a very large proportion of Germany’s present authors are Jews and
Radicals, gives the contemptuous attitude of Berlin’s aristocratic and
military classes toward literature a decided political twist.
This is rendered the more marked by the overwhelming Radicalism of the
city’s electorate. The immense balloon-like rise of the value of land,
and the tremendous race to erect buildings everywhere, brought to the
city a great concourse of artizans and labourers from all parts of
Germany. Competition gave them big wages, but it also incited the
formation of powerful trades’ unions, the best of which were in effect
Radical clubs, and the worst of which became centres of Socialist
agitation. Berlin has six members in the Reichstag, of which four are
Radicals, or _Freisinnige_, and two are Social Democrats. One of the
Radicals is Prof. Rudolph Virchow, and one of the Socialists is Paul
Singer, a Jew. The municipal institutions of Berlin, so far as they
depend upon the popular vote, are also in the hands of the Radicals.
So much for the new Berlin. On Oct. 28, 1888, William, who had just
returned from his Italian visit, the last of his series of journeys
for that year, received the Burgomaster and a delegation from the Town
Council, who came to the Schloss to congratulate him upon his return.
They presented an effusively loyal address, clearly intended as a
peace-offering from the Radical city to the new sovereign, and announced
the intention of erecting a great fountain in the Schloss-Platz to
commemorate the event.
William received this polite expression with studied insolence. After
ironically commenting upon the unexpectedness of such a demonstration,
he brusquely told them to build more churches in Berlin and to choke
off their Radical editors, who, during his absence, had shamelessly
discussed the most private affairs of his family. He had been
particularly angered by their insistence upon drawing comparisons
between himself and his late father, an affront which he would not
longer tolerate. He was about to take up his residence in Berlin,
and “considering the relations which existed between the municipal
authorities of Berlin and this Radical section of the press,” he
concluded that his hearers could stop this editorial impudence if they
liked. Their address was full of loyal professions; very well, let them
put these into practice.
Having said this in his roughest manner, William turned on his heel and
left the room without shaking hands with the Burgomaster or so much as
nodding to his colleagues.
This happened four months or so before the change in the young Kaiser’s
views and attitude which has been dealt with above. It is not out of
place here, however, because, although William was now swiftly and with
steady progress to alter his opinions on most other public subjects, he
has not even yet altogether outgrown the notion that editors ought to
wear muzzles.