III.—Landmarks in Hohenzollern History.
No one would call the political history of Germany an interesting history. It is only the history of free nations or the free play of spiritual forces that is of abiding human interest, and the history of Germany is neither the history of a free people nor the conflict of spiritual forces. That history is so intolerably tedious that even the magic of Treitschke’s genius has not been able to relieve its dulness, and that before the war no British or French publisher dared venture on a translation of Treitschke’s masterpiece. But if the political history of Germany has all the tedium and monotony of parochialism, on the contrary, the personal history of the Hohenzollern is intensely instructive. One would hesitate to call it romantic. Yet there is an element of romance, the romance of business, the interest which attaches to the rise of a family from the humble obscurity of a petty princeling to the power and prestige of world rulers, the same kind of interest which belongs to the life-story of Mr. Vanderbilt or Mr. Carnegie. What a progress those Hohenzollerns have made from the distant days when they left their little Swabian southern home of Zollern between the Neckar and the Upper Danube, the cradle of their dynasty! Nomen, omen! Does not the very sound of the word Hohenzollern suggest and inspire high ambitions? And does not the very name of that little village of Zollern, which is apparently derived from Zoll, suggest that all the world was henceforth to pay a Zoll, or toll, to the dynasts of Hohenzollern?
And what a strange succession of incidents! In themselves those incidents may seem insignificant. They left little trace in the chronicles of olden times. Yet those petty incidents have proved decisive events in the annals of modern humanity. We see those events happening from generation to generation without any apparent connection. Yet somehow they all made for the aggrandizement of the family. We see successive Princes acquiring through marriage and inheritance possessions in scattered and remote outposts of the Holy Roman Empire. Yet somehow all those outposts became eventually milestones on the highway to greatness. One ancestor becomes Burgrave of Nuremberg—a considerable promotion! A subsequent Burgrave of Nuremberg lends money to a needy Austrian Emperor, and becomes in 1417 Elector of Brandenburg—a much more considerable promotion! Again, another ancestor inherits at the other extremity of Germany the petty dukedom of Cleves, and that dukedom became the nucleus of Prussian power in the Far West of Germany. Still another ancestor of a collateral branch becomes Grand Master of the religious Order of the Teutonic Knights, and this fact induces Master Martin Luther, who was much more of a realist and a time-server and a trimmer than theologians give him credit for, to advise the Hohenzollern Grand Master to secularize his knights, to confiscate the whole Church property of the Order, and to make himself the overlord of Eastern Prussia.
Thus everything has worked for the aggrandizement of the future Kings of Prussia, everything has brought grist to the mill of Sans-Souci.