CHAPTER VIII.—A YEAR OF EXPERIMENTAL ABSOLUTISM
The young Emperor’s dislike for the press was indeed a fruitful source of sensational incidents during the first year or two of his reign, and still is uneasily felt to contain the elements of possibly further disturbance. The fault of this attitude is by no means entirely on one side. Both the character of the Kaiser and the character of the German press are in large part what Bismarck has made them, and if their less admirable sides clash and grind into each other with painful friction from time to time, it is only what might be expected. During Bismarck’s twenty-eight years of power in Prussia he so by turns debauched and coerced the press that the adjective “reptile” had to be invented by outsiders properly to describe its venomous cowardice. He openly and contemptuously prostituted it to serve his poorest and pettiest uses, so that it was not possible for any one to think of it with respect; yet, oddly enough, he always showed the keenest and most thin-skinned sensitiveness when its attacks or inuendoes were aimed at himself.
This whimsical susceptibility to affront in the printed word, no matter how mean or trivial the force back of it, is a trait which has often come near making Bismarck ridiculous, and it is not pleasant to note how largely William seems also to be possessed with it. He is as nervous about what the papers will say as a young débutante on the stage. Not only does he keep an anxious watch upon the talk of the German editors, but he ordains a vigilant scrutiny of the articles printed in foreign countries from the pens of correspondents stationed at Berlin. In this he is very German. Nobody in England, for example, ever dreams of caring about, or for the most part of even taking the trouble to learn, what is printed abroad about English personages or politics. The foreign correspondents in London are as free as the wind that blows. But matters were ordered very differently at the beginning of the present reign in Berlin, and to this day journalists pursue their calling there under a sense of espionage hardly to be imagined in Fleet Street. It is true that a change for the better is distinctly visible of late, but it will be the work of many years to eradicate the low views of German journalism which Bismarck instilled, alike, unfortunately, in the royal palaces and the editorial offices of Prussia.
One of the very first acts of William’s reign was the expulsion from Berlin of two French journalists whose sympathetic accounts of his father’s dismissal of Puttkamer had been distasteful to the royal eye. In the following January the correspondents of the Figaro and National of Paris were similarly driven out. In March, 1889, simultaneously with the seizure of the Berlin Volks-Zeitung and the prosecution of the Freisinnige Zeitung, a new Penal Code was presented to the Reichstag which contained such arbitrary provisions for stamping out the remaining liberties of the press that even the Cologne Gazette denounced it as “putting a frightful weapon into the hands of the Government for suppressing freedom of speech and silencing opposition.” This measure did not pass, but the odium of having introduced it remained.
Although in other respects William was already observed to be separating himself from his Chancellor, it is clear that he has a large share in this odium. All his utterances, both at this time and up to the present date, show how thoroughly he believes in editing the editors. This tendency was during the year 1889 to exhibit its comical side.
The special organ of the Waldersee party was the high-and-dry old Tory journal, the Kreuz-Zeitung. Early in the year this mouthpiece of the anti-Bismarck coalition was raided by the Chancellor, and both its offices and the house of its editor, Baron Hammerstein, ransacked for incriminating documents. The Kaiser is believed to have intervened to prevent more serious steps being taken. Later in the year, as the success of the Waldersee combination in weaning the Kaiser away from Bismarck grew more and more marked, the Kreuz-Zeitung foolishly gave voice to its elation, and attacked the “Cartel” coalition of parties which controlled the Reichstag. The Kaiser thereupon printed a personal communique in the official paper saying that he approved of the “Cartel” and was “unable to reconcile the means by which the Kreuz-Zeitung assailed it with respect for his own person.” This warning proved insufficient, for in the following January Baron Hammerstein put up as a candidate for a vacancy at Bielefeld, and talked so openly about being the real nominee of the Kaiser that William caused to be inserted in all the papers a notice of his order that the Kreuz-Zeitung should not henceforth be taken at any of the royal palaces, or allowed in public reading-rooms. It may be imagined how the Liberal editors chuckled over this.
So recently as in May of last year, two months after the retirement of Bismarck, when the regular official deputation from the new Reichstag waited upon William, he pointed out to the Radical members that the Freisinnige press was criticizing the army estimates, which he and his generals had made as low as possible, and sharply warned them to see that a stop was put to such conduct on the part of their friends, the Radical editors. And only last December, in his remarkable speech to the Educational Conference, he lightly grouped journalists with the “hunger candidates” and others who formed an over-educated class “dangerous to society.”
This inability to tolerate the expression of opinions different from his own is very Bismarckian.
The ex-Chancellor, in fact, has for years past acted and talked upon the theory that anybody who did not agree with him must of necessity be unpatriotic, and came at last to hurl the epithet of Reichsfeind—enemy of the Empire—every time any one disputed him on any point whatsoever.
William has roughly shorn away Bismarck’s pretence to infallibility, but about the divine nature of his own claims he has no doubt. Some of his deliverances on questions of morals and ethics, in his capacity as a sort of helmeted Northern Pope, are calculated to bring a smile to the face of the Muse of History. His celebrated harangue to the Rector of the Berlin University, Professor Gebhardt, wherein he complained that, under the lead of democratic professors, the students were filled with destructive political doctrines, and concluded by gruffly saying, “Let your students go more to churches and less to beer cellars and fencing saloons”—was put down to his youth, for it dates from the close of 1888. It is interesting to note, from William’s recent speech at Bonn, that he has decidedly altered his views on both beer-drinking and duelling among students. He began his reign, however, with ultra-puritanical notions on these as well as other subjects.
Long after this early deliverance his confidence in himself, so far from suffering abatement, had so magnified itself that he called the professors of another University together and lectured them upon the bad way in which they taught history. He had discovered, he said, that there was now much fondness for treating the French Revolution as a great political movement, not without its helpful and beneficent results. This pernicious notion must no longer be encouraged in German universities, but students should be taught to regard the whole thing as one vast and unmitigated crime against God and man.
In this dogmatic phase of his character William is much more like Frederic William I than like any of his nearer ancestors in the Hohenzollern line. These later monarchs, beginning with Frederic the Great and following his luminous example, were habitually chary about bothering themselves with their subjects’ opinions. William at one time thought a good deal upon the fact that he was a successor of Frederic the Great, and by fits and starts set himself to imitate the earlier acts of that sovereign. His restless flying about from place to place, and, even more clearly, his edicts rebuking the army officers for gambling and for harshness to their men, were copied from that illustrious original. But in his attitude toward the mental and moral liberty of his subjects he goes back a generation to Frederic’s father—and suggests to us also the reflection that he is a grandson of that highly self-confident gentleman whom English-speaking people knew as the Prince Consort.
Frederic the Great had so little of this spirit in him that he made himself memorably unique among eighteenth-century sovereigns by allowing such freedom to the press that liberty sank into license, and the most scandalous and mendacious attacks upon his personal life were printed in and hawked about Berlin to the end of his days. As for his refusal to interfere in the alleged perversion of Protestant children by Catholic teachers, his comment on the margin of the ministerial complaint, “In this country every man must get to heaven in his own way,” is justly cherished to this day as worth all his other writings put together.
William’s spasms, so to speak, of imitative loyalty to the memories of his ancestors have been productive of many curious, not to say diverting, results. Their progressive consecutiveness is not always easy to make out, but they afford, as a whole, very interesting insights into the young man’s temperament.
When tragic chance thrust him forward and upon the throne, his youthful imagination happened to be in some mysterious way under the spell of that most astounding of all his forefathers, Frederic William I. He spoke frequently with enthusiasm of the character of this rude, choleric barbarian, and even brought himself to believe that there was something fine in that strange creature’s inability to speak any language but German. It was under the sway of this admiration for the second Prussian King that William, in January of 1889, had all the French cooks in his palaces discharged, and ordered that hereafter the royal bill of fare should be a Speisekarte, with the names of dishes in German, instead of the accustomed menu in French. It will not, however, have escaped notice that William is a changeable young man, and this ultra-Teutonic mood did not last very long. In the following autumn he had so far recovered from it that his visit to Constantinople was reported to have been marred by the Sultan’s mistaken hospitality in giving him nothing but German champagnes to drink. It must be admitted, however, that scarcely the most robust prejudice could stand out long under such a test.
In the spring of 1890 there came the 150th anniversary of the accession of Frederic the Great, and with it a sudden shift in the young Kaiser’s admiration. For a long time thereafter he made no speech without alluding to this most splendid figure in Prussian history, and quoting him as an example to be followed with reverential loyalty.
Then in December came the turn of still a third bygone Hohenzollern. It was on December 1, 1640, that the youth of twenty, who was later to be known as the Great Elector, entered upon the herculean task of saving hapless, bankrupt little Brandenburg from literal annihilation. William has told us that as a boy he scarcely learned anything at all about this illustrious ancestor of his. Apparently little had been done to make good this lack of information up to the time when, toward the close of 1890, he found that the Great Elector’s 250th anniversary was near at hand, and felt that it ought to be celebrated. He began reading the history of that memorable reign, and was at once excitedly interested and impressed. There has always been a charming, if childish, naivete about the manner in which William frankly exposes his mental processes, and, having just heard of something for the first time which everybody else knows, brings it forward to public notice as if it were a fresh and most remarkable discovery. The effect produced upon him by his belated introduction to the life and works of the last Elector affords an apt illustration of this tendency. At the celebration William made a long speech in eulogy of his ancestor, which in every sentence seemed to take it for granted that heretofore no one had written or thought or known about the Great Elector. Since that time the young Emperor has rarely spoken in public, at least to a Prussian audience, without some reference to this distinguished predecessor—whereas we never hear now of either Frederic the Great or his savage father.
Doubtless the fervour with which William has adopted the Great Elector as his model ancestor is in large part due to the fact that the latter’s first important act was the summary dismissal of his father’s Prime Minister, Schwarzenberg. The parallel to be drawn between the disgrace of this powerful favourite and the fall of Bismarck is often faulty and nowhere exact, but it is evident that it impressed William’s imagination greatly when he came upon it, and that he could not resist the temptation to suggest it to the world at large. In this same anniversary speech he said: “My stout ancestor had no one to lean upon.”
The eminent statesman who had served his predecessor was revealed to have worked for his own personal ends, and the young sovereign was forced to mark out his own path unaided. The comparison was a cruel one, because the manner in which Schwarzenberg “worked for his own personal ends” was that of taking bribes to betray his royal master and his country. Yet the loose phrase could also describe Bismarck’s hot-headed use of his vast governmental powers to crush his individual enemies, and in this sense every one felt that William was instituting a comparison.
But this embittered remark belongs to a much later period than has as yet come under our view, and marks an acute stage of the dramatic and momentous quarrel between Kaiser and Chancellor, of the dawning of which there were only vague anticipatory rumours in 1889.