Germany before the war

by baron Beyens

This endless hunting after personal popularity led to family scenes which the palace walls in Berlin and Potsdam, impenetrable though they are as a rule, could not altogether keep secret from an inquisitive public. The banishment of the Crown Prince to Danzig was solely due to his intemperate language in speech and writing. The Emperor sent him, for his sins, to a remote corner of Prussia, under the pretext of making him learn his duties as a regimental commander. After a time it became evident that in his distant fortress he was more embarrassing and less easy to watch than in Berlin. He was therefore recalled and put upon the General Staff, nominally that he might be initiated into the mysteries of Prussian strategy and tactics, really that he might remain under his father’s eye. In point of fact, we must not make too much of his escapades, which are traditional among heirs to the Hohenzollern throne. Frederick the Great, famous before his accession for his quarrels with his brutal sire, was not the first Prussian heir-apparent who rebelled against paternal authority. Later on, in the last century, the Emperor William I., when he was next in the line of succession to his brother, Frederick William IV., held, during the latter’s reign, a little princely Court that was a hotbed of criticism and opposition. And the present Emperor? Who will believe that in his passionate self-assertiveness he would not have caused just as much vexation and embarrassment to his father, if the Emperor Frederick had reigned for more than a few months?

We should misjudge William II. if we attributed to him any jealousy of his son’s growing popularity. He has too exalted an idea of his own worth for that, and he cannot cherish any illusions as to the real capacity of his heir. To insinuate that the Emperor took time by the forelock owing to his fear of this popularity, which threatened to eclipse his own, would be tantamount to saying that the Crown Prince was the causa causans, the prime mover of the appeal to arms; and this would be assigning to him an importance and an influence which he has never at any time possessed. His incitements to war and his martial ardour would never have succeeded in making any impression on the Emperor, if the latter had not himself resolved to forge ahead, and to risk the great gamble in which the fate of Germany and of Europe was at stake.

The German Empire as Bismarck conceived it, with a single minister bearing on his own shoulders, like some Atlas, the whole weight of the vast governmental machine, was cut to the measure of its founder. If this system is to last, the nation must always have at its head either a great Chancellor, or a great monarch under whom the Chancellor merely acts as his deputy. So long as Bismarck was at the helm, he steered the ship of Empire with an unfaltering hand through all the reefs of internal politics—Kulturkampf, anti-Socialist legislation, party divisions, unstable majorities in the Reichstag. After the dismissal of the great man, and under the powerful impetus that he had given her, the vessel kept on her course for some time, having for her pilot the Sovereign himself, who made up for his lack of genius by his ample self-confidence. In this way she safely passed many rocks, borne along by the swelling tide of national prosperity, but occasionally threatened with disaster for want of a submissive majority to vote credits in the Imperial Parliament.

It is not difficult to imagine what would become of the Empire under the Crown Prince’s rule. He too, like his father, but with less intelligence, will wish to be at the helm, and, by the sheer force of his will as monarch by divine right, to stem the rising tide of popular demands, growing ever hungrier and stormier under the sweeping blast of Socialism. The conception of liberty that Treitschke shadowed forth for his countrymen about 1870—a liberty having its roots in the idea of duty, that is to say, where politics are concerned, in obedience to the powers that be—will not prevail in the Germany of the future. In my opinion, it is not even accepted by the majority of Germans to-day. Their conception is that of a liberty based on the idea of justice rather than of duty: in other words, on the nation’s right to share, through its representatives, in the government of the Empire. Thus there is a prospect of bitter struggles between a ruler of the Crown Prince’s type and a Reichstag that is half or three-fourths Socialist, assuming indeed that these struggles do not begin long before he comes to the throne.

III.

The five remaining sons of the Emperor give little food for public discussion. Like happy nations, they have no history. Political ambitions and the chase for popularity they leave to their eldest brother. Their lives are passed in a pleasant round of military service (less arduous for princes than for ordinary officers), social amusements, and sport. Only one of them has entered the navy, where work is certainly harder than in the army. Three others, as officers of the Guards, used to do garrison duty at Potsdam, spending the season of festivities in Berlin. One, on leaving the University of Strassburg, was sent off to a provincial station.

From time to time, in winter, one or more of the young princely couples were to be seen in diplomatic drawing-rooms. It must not be imagined, however, that they were anxious to consort with ambassadors and foreign ministers. They have no particular respect for those who represent the countries of the Old World or the New, and in general, like Alfred de Musset’s hero, they profess

“A high disdain for peoples and for kings.”

Their horizon is bounded by Germany, nay it is even restricted to the frontiers of Prussia. The idea of gaining enlightenment, from good sources, as to the political institutions, the internal situation, or the state of public opinion in other countries, leaves them entirely cold, just as it fails to attract the Crown Prince. As a rule, a quick hand-shake, without words, was all that they accorded to the heads of foreign legations. But as soon as one of our confraternity got together a small band of musicians for a ball or an informal dance, the princes were glad to do him the honour of letting themselves be invited. The diplomatic drawing-rooms were in their eyes nothing but rendezvous for dancing and flirtation.