Authors: Ian Buruma
The pictures and knickknacks and even the furniture tell us a great deal about the kaiser’s personality and preoccupations. Wherever he roamed in his house in Doorn, he would see images of himself, or his manly deeds. There is a meerschaum pipe, for example, with the kaiser’s head serving as the bowl. Shavings from chopped-up trees are on display behind glass, every one signed and dated by the kaiser. The most famous piece of furniture is the kaiser’s desk chair, a saddle on collapsible French Empire-style legs. The walls of his study are decorated with nautical scenes, many of them badly painted, like cheap Christmas cards, mostly of German battleships and imperial yachts, but also of Admiral Nelson’s flagship, HMS
Vanguard
. One of the most curious items in the house is a drawing done by the kaiser, in 1895, of the peoples of Europe hovering on the edge of a cliff behind heroic Germania, who is pointing to the Yellow Peril threatening Europe from Japan. Britannia is a shy and reluctant-looking maiden, taken firmly by the hand by manly Prussia. A copy of this picture was presented with a letter to Tsar Nicholas by the Kaiser’s aide-de-camp, Helmuth von Moltke. After having the picture explained to him, the tsar sent a telegram to his German cousin, in English: “Best thanks for Your Letter and the charming picture that Moltke brought. Hope You have a good sport.”
After the debacle in 1918, the kaiser had lost all his authority. Yet in Doorn he behaved as though he were still ruling the German Reich. His entourage had shrunk to a few military aides, lords chamberlain,
who arrived from Berlin in monthly shifts, and a staff of maids, cooks, and foresters. But the imperial protocol was rigidly observed. Men had to be in full uniform. Daily briefings were held. The emperor would pronounce on world affairs. And these pronouncements were often eccentric to the point of lunacy.
They would begin in the early morning, at 7:40
A.M
. to be exact, when the kaiser conducted morning prayers, after a brisk walk in the woods. Religion on these occasions slipped easily into politics. The kaiser’s obsession with backstabbing Jews and Bolsheviks was often vented. Europe, he would tell his courtiers and guests, could be saved only by German faith and the restoration of the Hohenzollern throne. First Germany and then Europe would be purged of Jewish Bolsheviks. Naturally, blood would flow, and traitors would be hanged in large numbers. But Germany would act through God’s will, or as the kaiser put it:
“Gesta Dei per Germanos.”
(Despite the blood-curdling rhetoric, the kaiser could be oddly squeamish when it came to the real thing; news of the Kristallnacht in 1938 made him feel “ashamed to be a German.”)
After breakfast the kaiser would do some gardening and tree-chopping. Between midday and one o’clock, his aide-de-camp would read selected newspaper articles to him and supply him with his reading for the day. Anything to do with the Bolshevik threat was studied with particular care. The kaiser also took a deep interest in archaeological studies and the history of tribal or cultural symbols, such as the swastika, as well as works dealing with the Jewish question. A German translation of
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
was on his reading list.
Lunch was taken in the dining room. The kaiser ate very fast. As soon as he was finished, a bell was rung, and regardless of whether others had finished their meals, the table was swiftly cleared. Lunch was followed by a nap, after which the kaiser went up to his study in the medieval tower, mounted his saddle-chair, and scribbled his comments on the daily news. He often had guests for tea: Dutch and German professors who discussed racial hygiene with him, or the divine origins of Nordic peoples; or sycophants from Germany who treated the kaiser as though he were divine himself. Sven Hedin, the explorer, was a guest, and so was Hermann Göring. After a formal dinner,
which the kaiser, as usual, gobbled up, came the time his courtiers dreaded most, the discussion of world politics in the smoking room.
The discussion was actually a monologue, delivered in the kaiser’s odd but apparently not wholly unattractive bark. His gestures were energetic but not, according to an English admirer, “like a Frenchman’s.” First the kaiser read out his lengthy comments on the day’s news. Then, staring fiercely through a swirling curtain of cigar smoke, he would hold forth until eleven o’clock, and often later. His listeners had usually fallen asleep by then, their eyes carefully hidden behind their hands.
As the years passed by and the call for his leadership failed to come, even under the Nazis, who had made some vague promises in the beginning, the kaiser’s theories became ever more extreme. The liberal, Freemason, Franco-Anglo-Jewish alliance, which had betrayed the kaiser in 1918, was Satan’s work. The devil’s plot to rule the world was financed by English Freemasons and American Jews. Moscow Jews had infiltrated everywhere. Jesuits were plotting with Freemasons. The yellow and black races were controlled by the Jews. Jesus Christ was of course not a Jew, but a blond Galilean spreading an Aryan faith. The Jews were actually a negroid race in disguise. The French were a negroid race as well. The British, who allowed “niggerboys” to march as Boy Scouts with the sons of nobles, were on the way to becoming a negroid race. But above all, Britain, that greedy nation of shopkeepers, that selfish, arrogant, hateful nation living on Jewish-Freemason money, was “Jewified” (
verjudet
) through and through—not so much the good, Nordic British people, of course, but the decadent aristocracy, which was soaked in Jewish money and blood. “Juda-England” was the enemy of Europe. A war to end all wars would have to be waged to purge Europe of Jews and Jewified Brits. Germany would be the founder of a United States of Europe. And once Britain itself was free of Jews and had rejected the United States of America, it, too, could join its true brethren in a European union of Aryans.
There was nothing very original in these demented ravings. Talk of Jewish-Freemason plots had been around for years, and not just in Germany. The embittered kaiser was simply repeating pseudoscientific claptrap fed to him by the likes of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the British Wagnerian expert on culture and race. And there was
of course plenty of paranoia blowing across the German border to further inflame passions at Doorn. What needs to be explained in the kaiser’s case is not his anti-Semitism, which was common enough in the circles he moved in, but his peculiar brand of anti-Semitic Anglophobia, his obsession with “Juda-England.” Here was a man, after all, who had worn a British admiral’s uniform with intense pride; who adored his grandmother, Queen Victoria; who pined for real English tea and read the English papers; who modeled the German navy after the Royal Navy; who was happiest on his British-made yacht and loved to sail on British battleships; who had enjoyed his holidays at Windsor and Osborne; who had been criticized in the German press for his Anglophilia, and was described by his closest friend, Count Philipp zu Eulenburg, as “Wilhelm the Englishman.” His favorite poet was Kipling, and he devoured the stories of P. G. Wodehouse. The kaiser was indeed half-English, through his mother, Princess Victoria, also known as “Vicky” or, to her immediate family, as “Pussy.”
There was, of course, nothing unusual about a monarch having parents from different countries. Monarchs lived in their own world, which was above nationality. Danes ruled in Greece, Germans and Dutch ruled in England, a Spaniard became queen of Belgium, and so on. To be of mixed parentage should not have posed personal problems in this cosmopolitan world of crowned heads, who spoke mostly French to one another and were all related, somehow, to Queen Victoria. And yet the kaiser suffered. He came of age in an era of extreme nationalism. Nationhood mattered even to monarchs, or indeed especially to monarchs, whose task it was to reflect “national identity.” In a nation where nationhood grew more and more confused with race, the kaiser was never able to reconcile the blood of two nations running though his veins. He was both an Anglophile and an Anglophobe, and his peculiar psychodrama shows what catastrophes can happen when a neurotic obsession with national identity takes the wrong turn.
I
T IS PROBABLY
true to say that racial purity mattered less to the kaiser than being a tough guy. His Hackeritis, his love of military pomp, of strutting about in outlandish uniforms, of mounting saddles in his study and cultivating his absurd mustache all point in that direction.
He could apparently be rather charming and had a quick intelligence, but he did so wish to show off his manliness, or turn other men into “women.”
Although not especially noted for his sense of humor, the kaiser did have an idiosyncratic sense of fun. Practical jokes were common practice among hearties of his time, in Britain as much as in Prussia. But the kaiser’s jokes showed a peculiar malice. He would make visitors cry with pain by turning his rings inward and squeezing their hands. Smacking elderly dignitaries on their backsides was another one of his amusements, or snipping their braces with a knife. He enjoyed making his generals perform for him as barking dogs, or ballerinas. In 1908 this proved to be fatal for General Dietrich von Hülsen, chief of the kaiser’s Military Cabinet, who danced in a tutu for the kaiser and promptly died of a heart attack. Sixteen years before that sad event, the general’s brother, Georg von Hülsen, wrote a remarkable letter to one of Wilhelm’s intimates, Count Emil von Schlitz gennant von Görtz, proposing a jape he was sure the kaiser would find most diverting: “You must be paraded by me as a circus poodle!—That will be a ‘hit’ like nothing else. Just think: behind
shaved
(tights), in front long bangs out of black or white wool, at the back under a genuine poodle tail a marked rectal opening and, when you ‘beg,’
in front
a fig-leaf. Just think how wonderful when you bark, howl to music, shoot off a pistol, or do other tricks. It is simply
splendid
!!…”
The kaiser, like most cruel practical jokers, was singularly lacking in self-confidence. Most historians blame this on his mother, Vicky. Her character was rather overweening, and so was her sense of Britishness. Not that her Britishness was straightforward. Her father, Prince Albert, was of course German, and her mother, Queen Victoria, partly of Hanoverian stock. As a child, Vicky is said to have spoken English with a German accent, and German with an English accent. She also spoke French—I’m not sure in what accent. And home life with Victoria and Albert was as
gemütlich
German as it was English. Most remarkably of all, Vicky seems to have got much of her sense of British superiority from her German father, whom she idolized.
Prince Albert was too earnest, too industrious, too intellectual—in a word, too German—to fit in easily with the British aristocracy, which, on the whole, took pride in its indolence. He got on best with earnest, industrious, liberal politicians like Gladstone. Albert, with all his romantic
yearnings for Ossianism, had liberal views himself. It is ironic to think that he, a German prince, abolished dueling in Britain. (Just as it is ironic that his very British daughter introduced calisthenics for girls in Germany.) Albert believed that Britain’s constitutional monarchy was the best possible system for a modern European state. His Voltairean dream was to help liberalize Germany by reforming it in the British mold. Once Prussia had become a constitutional monarchy, he thought, Germany would be unified as a liberal state and be a natural ally of Britain. Vicky’s marriage in 1858 to Friedrich Wilhelm (“Fritz”), crown prince of Prussia, was part of a deliberate strategy to bring this happy conclusion about.
Albert’s favorite daughter, with whom he studied Karl Marx as well as Blackstone’s
Commentaries on the Laws of England
, was to Anglicize Prussia by first Anglicizing her husband, the hero of the Battle of Königgratz. Since she was brilliant and very forceful and he was devoted to her, she succeeded with him, if not with Prussia. She was rather patronizing about it, however. Vicky reminded Fritz in a letter, written in 1864, that he had not been well versed in “the old liberal and constitutional conceptions” when they married, but “what enormous strides you have made during these years.”
This was decidedly not the Prussian way for wives to treat their husbands, and the bright but rather pushy
Engländerin
was not popular in her adopted country. She found life in Berlin, with its Anglophobic Junkers and its stuffy royal court, extremely tedious. She liked having artists and writers around her, not courtly philistines and heel-clicking soldiers. She deplored the anti-Semitism in Prussian circles. And, besides, the plumbing in the palace was atrocious.
Fritz put the Anglophobia of his people down to their “consciousness that England was the bearer of liberal institutions.” The type of German (there were quite a few) who appreciated Fritz’s “English” liberalism was not universally popular in his country either. Many Jewish sons, born in the 1860s and 1870s, were named Friedrich in gratitude to the crown prince’s tolerant attitudes. Their gratitude was justified. In 1880, Fritz, in a Prussian field marshal’s uniform, attended a service at a Berlin synagogue, to show where he stood on the Jewish question. It was, alas, not a harbinger of better times. As one of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s harshest critics, the journalist Maximilian Harden, once said in bitter jest: “Freedom is an obsolete Jewish concept” (The
kaiser called Harden, who was Jewish, “a poisonous monster from Hell.”)
Having an overbearing mother was, however, not the kaiser’s only problem as he struggled toward manhood. There was the matter of his arm, fifteen centimeters short and of little use. For a boy who longed to cut a martial figure, it must have been an excruciating liability. It is of symbolic significance that the kaiser’s crippled arm was blamed by German Anglophobes on the ministrations of a British doctor who had assisted at his birth. It had been a horrendous birth. Vicky had to be doused with chloroform for hours and barely survived the experience. But it was a German doctor (“poor Dr. Martin”), not the Englishman, Dr. Clark, who managed with enormous difficulty to extract the baby from under the crown princess’s gray flannel skirt. Modesty prescribed that doctors had to work, as it were, in the dark. In the process, the baby’s arm was damaged by Dr. Martin’s forceps.