Dearest Vicky, Darling Fritz (21 page)

In London the Foreign Secretary Lord Granville had written to Queen Victoria that the Crown Prince had ‘distinguished himself not only by his military success, but by his humanity, his moderation and his large political views’, while his friendship, ‘in spite of the atmosphere with which he has been surrounded, is invaluable for the future.’
⁴⁰
However endless festivities at home to commemorate the victory, and the formalities of day-to-day business, denied him the rest he needed. The first imperial
Reichstag
was opened on 21 March with Bismarck raised to the rank of Prince. To Augusta, victory celebrations meant more court balls and drawing-rooms, at which she insisted that Fritz and Vicky should take part and accompany her. Her ‘orders’ were peppered with bitter attacks on the pro-French sympathies of England, and particularly on a speech made by Queen Victoria at the opening of Parliament in February referring to the belligerent powers as ‘two great and brave nations’, which she saw as a snub for Germany.

On 16 June the victorious army entered Berlin through the Brandenburg Gate, an occasion for more waving of flags and handkerchiefs, cascades of flowers and wreaths. The procession held a sinister note for Vicky as she rode through the gate beside Fritz, resplendent with his new Field-Marshal’s baton. When she turned round and saw Willy, following on his small dappled pony she was alarmed at the look of pride on his face, basking in the knowledge that one day this victorious heritage would be his. He seemed to look up to his grandfather the Kaiser as the living embodiment of all this glory, rather than his father whose active participation in the war and intense desire for German unity in the face of prevarication from others had done far more to make it possible.

Even at the time, Vicky had had her reservations about the new era that her husband had greeted so enthusiastically, seeing confusion everywhere. ‘Our political judgement, our interest in social progress and in the progressive development of our own country has diminished because of the war!’ she wrote. ‘I fear that an era of reaction will ensue – I can already see its dark shadows hovering over us!’
⁴¹

*
See below, p. 197.

*
In addition to the version published in Germany in 1926 and in English translation a year later, there are three manuscript versions in the Geheimes Preussisches Staatsarchiv, Merseburg. While most of the entries are in Fritz’s own handwriting, there are some additions and passages in other hands, including significant comments indicating sympathy with progressive, as opposed to constitutional, liberalism, written by Vicky. See Kollander, 93–5.

SIX

‘
Malice is rampant
’

V
icky and Fritz’s sojourn during the summer of 1871 at Osborne was their first visit to England for nearly three years, since they had spent Christmas 1868 there. It was a relief to escape from the martial atmosphere of Berlin, and see for themselves that the general anti-German feeling in England was not directed at them personally. When Berlin commemorated the first anniversary of victory at Sedan in September 1871, they refused to join in the official celebrations and boycotted the church services. They maintained that the real heroic deeds had occurred on the battlefield and that to take part in the celebrations would only be adding to Bismarck’s self-glorification, but their principled refusal to take part in such humbug, as they saw it, cost them support from other members of the family and public.

Angered by their visit to England, the Kaiser vented his displeasure on them by initially refusing permission to take the children to Wilhelmshöhe in Kassel, away from Potsdam, when a smallpox epidemic was raging in Berlin and three hundred children died within ten days. Potsdam, he retorted, was perfectly healthy, and they would stay there unless he received an official written statement to the contrary from the court doctor. ‘Just think of Fritz at forty being treated like a boy of six’,
¹
Vicky complained to Queen Victoria. To ensure he was not disobeyed, the Kaiser sent a general to the palace as guard and virtual gaoler. Having made his point, he relented and let them go to Kassel, but not on grounds of health, ‘a ridiculous excuse’. They spent several weeks there until all danger of infection was gone, but Fritz was furious with his father for imposing such petty restrictions.

Vicky was pregnant again, and deeply hurt when Empress Augusta chose to break the news to Queen Victoria herself. To add to her discomfort her old friend Countess Blücher, who had helped her through previous confinements, had recently died. She felt more than usually wretched and fearful of the consequences, but Queen Victoria bluntly told her that she hoped she (Vicky) would be satisfied, ‘& not go on exhausting your
health
& strength so precious to
all
you belong to & so necessary to your husband & children & to your adopted country.’
²
The Empress then promised that she would be with Vicky for her confinement, asking her at the same time if she would help her secure an invitation to visit Queen Victoria in England. When she received an invitation for early May, she exasperated her daughter-in-law and the Queen by asking if it could be altered to June, and then left the heavily-pregnant Vicky, going to England in mid-April instead.

Fortunately Vicky gave birth to a fourth daughter without complications on 22 April 1872, named Margaret in honour of Crown Princess Margharita of Italy, one of the godparents. By the time of the baby’s christening her head was covered in short hair and she was nicknamed Mossy; the name stuck to her throughout her life. Vicky was mildly disappointed that this eighth child was a girl, as the patriot in her made her feel she owed Germany another son. However she was disinclined to go through a ninth confinement, and Mossy remained the baby of the family.

By this time Vicky had recognized that the youngest children would always be the ones closest to her. Like her mother, she had learnt from bitter experience that it only brought disappointment to expect too much of her sons and daughters. Where their upbringing was involved, she fretted about the difficulty of doing the right thing for them as a parent; ‘I am often so
despondent
& think with
such
a heavy heart about the future of the 3 eldest!’
³

With fewer military duties in peacetime, Fritz found a new role as a patron of the arts and appointment as Protector of Public Museums, with special responsibility for raising the standard of the royal museums and galleries and overseeing the acquisition of new exhibits. Now Prussia was no longer a small military kingdom, but the centre of a new imperial power, it had to take its place alongside the cultural centres of Dresden and Munich, and compete with other countries in the arts as well as in industrial and commercial expansion. Every report to the minister of education on museums was to be initially submitted to him, and he was to see a copy of every order from the ministry. Vicky was in her element, helping to discharge a function so close to one of her father’s passions, and she and Fritz relished regular visits to studios of painters and sculptors at home and abroad. Anton von Werner, who had accompanied him on the Franco-Prussian campaign and painted the official group portrait of the proclamation ceremony at Versailles, owed his position as a leading historical artist and his presidency of the Fine Arts Academy to Fritz’s patronage, while the painter Adolf von Menzel and the sculptor Reinhold Begas also came to know their Crown Prince and Princess well and appreciate their keen interest in their work. At the same time Fritz was foremost in instigating and encouraging new excavations at Olympia in Greece and Pergamon in Asia Minor, which eventually resulted in the exhibition of the lifesized Greek temple and Babylonian victory walk at the Pergamon museum in Berlin.

Another of his schemes to bear fruit was the Hohenzollern Museum. It was inspired by a visit before his marriage to the Rosenbørg Castle, Copenhagen, a museum containing souvenirs of the Danish monarchy, and he wanted to establish a similar collection in Berlin commemorating his own dynasty. Portraits, weapons, furniture and similar items, accompanied by captions and explanations, all found their place in a new museum opened on 22 March 1877, the Kaiser’s eightieth birthday.

Politically Vicky and Fritz had grounds for optimism during the first few years of empire, regarded as Prussia’s ‘liberal era’. The National Liberals comprised the majority party in the
Reichstag
, the Prussian cabinet included three liberal ministers, and they pursued a policy of free trade which ushered in several years of economic prosperity. Despite liberal setbacks during the crisis which brought Bismarck to power, they had made gains in the late 1860s and early 1870s, with the constitution intact and unification achieved. With an elderly Kaiser and Bismarck in uncertain health, liberals looked forward to the day when politicians of their stamp would hold the highest offices of state. While recent advances promised further progressive reforms, they were divided as to the benefits of an increase in parliamentary power. The Crown Prince, and liberals such as Heinrich von Treitschke, Heinrich von Sybel, and Rudolf Haym, saw the foundation of the empire as the fulfilment of the liberal programme, and questioned the desirability of transferring English institutions to Germany. Other National Liberals and Progressives hoped the future course of liberal reform would see the formation of a government responsible to parliament that would control the budget of the military, the strongest support of the monarchy.

Meanwhile Fritz supported the ministry’s efforts to combat certain forces in the empire, especially the Roman Catholic church in Germany. He was at one with Bismarck and the liberal majority in thinking that the German Catholics owed more allegiance to Rome than to the imperial government, and they wanted to restrict the power of an apparently anti-national and potentially disruptive spirit in the new empire. Hostility toward Catholics increased after the founding in Prussia in 1870 of the Catholic Centre Party, which had become the second largest party in the
Reichstag
within a year. Bismarck thought that German Catholics, supported by their counterparts in Austria and France, could compromise imperial unity and undermine the Protestant majority in Germany, while the liberals opposed the Roman Catholic church’s restraints upon individual freedom. The anti-Catholic campaign, the
Kulturkampf
, or cultural struggle between modernity and medievalism, took the form of measures designed to combat what they saw as a Catholic threat, such as a law eliminating ecclesiastical supervision in schools, and the disbanding of an anti-liberal Jesuit order. It reached its height in May 1873 with anti-Catholic legislation in Prussia, the ‘May Laws’, placing restrictions on the training and employment of priests and on the church’s disciplinary powers. By supporting these measures the liberals believed their support of the
Kulturkampf
would ultimately increase the power of the
Reichstag
against Bismarck’s autocratic policies in other fields.

As he had long advocated the liberal ideal of a secular state, Fritz supported these measures, seeing in the
Kulturkampf
the realization of schemes that he himself had proposed earlier to control Catholic influence in Germany. He had previously tried to alert his father and Bismarck to what he saw as Rome’s attempts to increase its clerical authority in Germany; a few years earlier he had discussed a plan with Friedberg, the Minister of Justice, to grant the German Catholic church a status similar to that of the Hungarian Catholic church, which had looser ties with Rome. The scheme found them at one with Bismarck, intent on bringing the German Catholic church under state control so it might serve as a unifying force in the empire.
Kulturkampf
legislation resembled Fritz’s goals so closely that the British ambassador to Germany, Odo Russell, suspected Bismarck’s support of the campaign was part of a plan to make himself indispensable to the future Kaiser.

As a tireless advocate of greater religious freedom for Catholics, Vicky took issue with her husband’s views on the subject. Reproached by her mother for not sharing the ‘fervent Protestantism’ of herself, the Prince Consort and Fritz, Vicky defended her own tolerance; ‘if other people are not of my way of thinking I can regret it, and think them difficult to understand but I do not blame them.’
⁴

By the late 1870s many supporters of the
Kulturkampf
, including Bismarck, saw it as a failure. German Catholics’ hostility to the government was increasing, as did the power of the Centre Party in the
Reichstag
. Some liberals also turned against the struggle as the discriminatory nature of such legislation conflicted with their endorsement of individual liberty. Fritz did not share their view, telling the Liberal leader Bamberger that deputies to the
Reichstag
from the Centre Party were not Germans but ‘aliens’ whose influence was intolerable. While he regretted some of the discriminatory legislation of the
Kulturkampf
, he believed that since the struggle had been undertaken, they needed to see it through, and he did not believe that German Catholics were turning against the monarchy.

Fritz’s endorsement of Bismarck’s policies during the early 1870s suggested that the Chancellor would be retained in office after Kaiser Wilhelm’s death. In November 1872 after a visit to Dresden to celebrate the golden wedding of the King and Queen of Saxony he intended to go directly from the festivities to join Vicky and the children in Switzerland, but on the journey he fell ill with an intestinal complaint. After a slow convalescence, most of which was spent at Karlsruhe with the Grand Duke and Duchess of Baden, he went for a cure at Wiesbaden. The right-wing
Rheinische Kurier
chose this moment to report that the Crown Prince had warned his wife that the physicians told him his illness was dangerous; his father was old, their eldest son was still a minor, and it was possible that she might be called upon to act as Regent for a time. In such a case, she had to promise her husband ‘to do nothing without Prince Bismarck, whose counsels have raised our House to undreamed-of power and greatness.’
⁵