Royal Babylon (14 page)

When the procurement of conscripts by abduction became too expensive and too dangerous, the King turned to crude genetic engineering. Every tall male in Prussia was forced to marry a tall woman. When this breeding program proved too slow and unreliable, he went back to kidnapping. Eventually Frederick William acquired 2,000 of his precious giants.

The price in human suffering was high. Living conditions for members of the Potsdam freak show were pitiful and morale was dreadful. Almost all of the men who passed through the regiment were held against their will. They mutinied regularly, and several times they tried to burn down the whole of
Potsdam in the hope of killing the King in the process. About 250 giants successfully deserted each year, but violent deaths during escape attempts were commonplace and reprisals brutal. The King dispatched bounty hunters on manhunts to track them down: those who were recaptured had their noses and ears sliced off and were locked in Spandau Prison. Many of the giants resorted to self-mutilation or suicide, or took part in mercy killings of their fellow soldiers to end their misery.

What was, potentially, the greatest basketball team in history was disbanded when King Frederick William I died, aged fifty-two. He was irascible to the end. On his deathbed he called for his physician and demanded to know how much longer he had to live. The doctor took his wrist and after a few moments gravely replied that he feared the worst as the King no longer had a pulse. “Impossible,” he roared, waving his arm in the air. “How could I move my fingers like this if my pulse were gone?” Frederick William had made his point, but the effort killed him.

         

The rise of Prussia reached critical momentum under Frederick William I's successor. Frederick “the Great” was the third son born to his parents, but the first named Frederick to survive infancy. Two earlier Fredericks were dead, the first from having his fragile head crammed into a crown at the time of the christening, the second from shock when the guns saluting his birth were fired too near his cradle. The young Prince was the antithesis of his father: physically small and frail, with a taste for French fashion, literature and music.

As with the neighboring Hanoverians, relationships between father and son in the Prussian royal household were dreadful. Frederick William saw his son's yearning for culture as a sign of latent homosexuality. The Crown Prince, raged Frederick William, was “effeminate, and wears his hair long and curled like a fool,” and so the father decided to thrash some sense into him. The boy was beaten regularly for the slightest of reasons. In 1730 the conflict between father and son reached a hiatus when the young Frederick tried to flee to England with a friend, Lieutenant Hans von Katte. It ended with his arrest and imprisonment, and the subsequent decapitation of his companion. The King had intended to kill his son as well, but had backed off in the face of international outrage.

Prussian machismo may have been the signature of his father's reign, but Frederick II turned it into a cult. The only true glamour figure in the Hohenzollern family tree was a military genius, one of the most dazzling leaders in European history, lauded as the greatest German who ever lived. Lord Acton said he was “the most consummate practical genius that ever inherited a modern throne.” Frederick's wars and battles are textbook classics of historic warfare. He raised Prussia from a second-rate German state into one of the greatest powers in Europe, but his methods were founded on a complete and ruthless disregard for human life.

Frederick's psychological profile reveals personality traits partly inherited and partly a result of his upbringing. Unlike his father, he did not suffer from progressive insanity, but his personality was dangerously flawed. His traumatic childhood at the mercy of his mad father undoubtedly left physical and psychological scars. His private life, depending which side of the conflicting evidence one chooses to believe,
was either completely sublimated or disgustingly perverted. He played the flute, composed and conversed with philosophers, but by the age of five the young Frederick also knew the entire Prussian drill manual by heart. As soon as his father died he threw himself into a military life of almost ceaseless war-making.

Everything he did was subjugated to his military needs. To calm his nerves before a battle, he would casually open a vein. When the tide turned against him he fought on with a vial of poison ready for suicide. Once, he was surprised to find one of his best soldiers shackled in irons. When he asked why this was so, he was told that the man had been caught buggering his horse. Frederick ordered: “Fool—don't put him in irons, put him in the infantry.” He then apologized to the soldier for taking his horse away from him.

His military ambitions required the mindless obedience of his Prussian officers, which he famously enforced with commonplace cruelty and his inhumane system of forcible recruiting. “Dogs,” he railed at his guards when they were hesitant under fire. “Do you want to live forever?” He was incapable of pity. Medical facilities in his army were practically nonexistent. The wounded were expected to find their own way off the battlefield and to hospital and were even denied rations. As only one in five who entered a Prussian military hospital came out alive, men deserted by the thousand rather than risk medical treatment, and hundreds more committed suicide. The King saw no point in spending money on warm uniforms instead of guns, and so hundreds of his men froze to death in winter. During the Seven Years War he reduced the population of Prussia by half a million.

In time, Frederick became more eccentric and miserly. He drank up to forty cups of coffee a day for several weeks in an experiment to see if it was possible to exist without sleep. It took his stomach three years to recover. His palace became a slum as his pampered Italian greyhounds soiled everything and tore his furnishings to ribbons. The most heroic figure in German history died filthy and neglected, dressed in rags, the shirt on his back so rotten that his valet had to dress him in one of his own for the burial.

         

The royal House of Hohenzollern produced several homosexuals and sadomasochists but few prolific adulterers, with one spectacular exception. When Frederick II died childless in 1786 the Prussian crown passed to his forty-two-year-old nephew Frederick William “the Fat,” a libertine who dedicated his life to maintaining his personal harem. It is unlikely that this King of Prussia ever opened a letter during his eleven-year reign, let alone conducted any serious state business, and abroad was regarded as a joke—a very far cry from his warlike and internationally respected predecessor.

Frederick William was married at twenty to his first cousin Elizabeth, a daughter of the odd Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel family. When Elizabeth found out about his coterie of mistresses she retaliated by taking lovers herself. In 1769, after four years of marriage, Frederick William divorced her. Although she was granted a pension, she remained for the rest of her ex-husband's life a virtual prisoner at Kustrin. Within a few months,
Frederick William was remarried, to Princess Frederica of Hesse-Darmstadt. His new wife bore him seven legitimate children, who were in turn vastly outnumbered by an unaudited horde of bastards acquired by his several mistresses.

The King's most enduring concubine, Wilhelmina Encke, began her acquaintance with him as a fourteen-year-old prostitute. Frederick William generously lavished a fortune on her and her family, providing them with purpose-built private palaces. Miss Encke was eventually married to a bibulous courtier named Reitz, but she was to remain the King's mistress for another twenty years. She and her scheming husband came to form the nucleus of a court clique who bought the King's favor by catering for his urges, mostly sexual. One of these hangers-on, a courtier named Bischoffswerder, introduced Frederick to an Italian drug called Diavolini which was taken to stimulate the libido. The King's drug supplier was rewarded with a free hand to run Prussian foreign policy.

Another important influence was an eccentrically garbed religious fanatic called Mayr, a priest who once attempted to demonstrate his faith by swallowing most of the Bible, although instead of achieving a higher level of consciousness he was only able to induce severe constipation and stomach cramps. One day, Mayr was preaching from the pulpit when he decided to liven up the sermon by firing two pistols into the throng of assembled worshipers. Not a moment too soon he was certified insane and dispatched to an asylum.

When the wanton Wilhelmina Encke began to show her age she continued to make herself useful to the King by procuring his mistresses, including a laundry maid and a couple of stage dancers. To her horror, however, the King entered into
not one, but two, bigamous marriages with the very mistresses that she had supplied, Julia von Voss and Sophia Dönhoff. These marriages received the approval of Frederick William's unusually accommodating Prussian court priests, who asserted they had found a precedent for such a bigamous arrangement in Martin Luther's blessing of a similar marriage contracted by Prince Philip of Hesse. They also received the unexpected blessing of his legal wife, Queen Frederica, who simply delighted in the distress that her husband's new sleeping arrangements were causing the much loathed Wilhelmina Encke.

By 1797 Frederick William's bloated body was burned out by a lifetime of excess, and the Prussian court became infested with charlatans and quack physicians hoping to make one last quick profit out of his condition. He was told to inhale the breath of two newborn calves, to sleep each night between two children aged between eight and ten, to listen to the sound of wind instruments, but in no circumstances the violin. He tried the lot and died of heart disease aged fifty-three.

         

Insanity revisited the Prussian royal family in the mid-nineteenth century. Kaiser Wilhelm II's great-uncle Frederick William IV, the only Hohenzollern “soldier king” incapable of riding a horse, succeeded to the throne in 1840 and from early in his reign was evidently mentally disturbed. His idea of a day out with the family was to take his wife, Elizabeth, and their children to watch surgical operations conducted by his friend, Dr. Johann Dieffenbach, a gentleman who had pioneered an
operation to cure stammering by severing the patient's tongue muscles.

In the 1850s the King suffered a series of strokes, causing him to become considerably more unstable, and his younger brother Wilhelm was asked to step in as temporary Regent. In 1858 it became apparent that the King's “softening of the brain” was irreversible and he was certified insane. For the next two years the by now extremely shortsighted King spent much of his time wandering around the Sans Souci Palace gardens, colliding with trees.

         

The first Emperor of the newly united Germany, Wilhelm I, was remarkable for his longevity, as indeed were most of the Hohenzollerns. He became such an institution during his ninety-one years that Berlin guidebooks listed the precise time he could be seen at the palace window watching the changing of the guard. His long life was marked by increasing eccentricity and, later in his reign, senile dementia. He ate lobster salad, potted meat and sorbet washed down with strong tea or champagne, always at midnight, virtually every day of his life. When the Emperor's victorious troops paraded through Berlin after the Franco-Prussian War he threw the parade into confusion by vanishing, then suddenly reappearing at the head of his troops and leading them past the saluting dais where he was supposed to be sitting.

The darker sign of the Hohenzollern psyche resurfaced in Wilhelm I and later in his grandson Kaiser Wilhelm II, both of whom showed signs of morbidity. Wilhelm I hung a picture over his bed of his mother laid out for burial. Later, his
grandson “Kaiser Bill” would kill a conversation by proudly producing from his wallet a collection of snapshots, not of his children, but of his deceased Hohenzollern relatives dressed in their funeral attire.

Between the two Wilhelms, Germany was ruled briefly by Frederick III. In him Europe had a glimpse of what might have been. Unfortunately he had nothing to say about his much vaunted liberal ideas for modernizing Germany, or anything else for that matter, because he came to the throne with cancer of the larynx and was dead within four months.

To his contemporaries, Frederick's son Kaiser Wilhelm II was a warmongering Prussian monster, the very embodiment of the evil ambitions of his country. History, however, reveals the Kaiser to have been a vain, ineffective megalomaniac who was completely out of touch with reality. There can have been few sovereigns as bizarrely egocentric as the Kaiser, or with such amusing results. Taking serious risks with historical accuracy, he imagined himself to be the latest of a long unbroken line of Hohenzollern warrior leaders, presenting himself to his subjects and the world as the personification of Prussian machismo. He hero-worshiped Frederick the Great and would quote his illustrious ancestor at every opportunity. He even aped Frederick's famous passion for greyhounds by keeping a pack of court dachshunds which fouled the palace. But, whereas Frederick the Great was a genuine leader and a true military genius, the Kaiser was just a maladjusted poseur.

The Kaiser's mother was Queen Victoria's eldest daughter, Vicky. His arrival in 1859 was a gynecological disaster. During a bungled breech birth, baby Wilhelm was crucially starved of oxygen, which left him with permanent brain damage. The most immediate sign of infirmity was a dislocated left arm
which failed to develop properly and which he never recovered the full use of. He also had a slightly lame left leg and crooked spine, and later in life he experienced partial deafness and regular shooting pains down the left-hand side of his head. His grandmother Queen Victoria declared that the malformed limb was a bad omen, a branding by the devil.