A lamentable and odious attitude this, truly! Yet, which of us was wholly wise at nineteen? And which of us, it may be added fairly, has encountered such magnificent and overpowering temptations to foolishness as these that beset young William?
Remember that all his associates, alike in his daily routine with his regiment or at the University and in his larger intercourse among the aristocratic social circles of Berlin, took only one view of this subject. At their head were Bismarck, the most powerful and impressive personality in Europe, and the aged Emperor, the one furiously inveighing against the manner in which the Protestant religion and political security were being endangered, the other deploring from his sick-bed the grievous inroads which were threatened upon the personal rights and prerogatives of the Hohenzollerns.
It is not strange that young William adopted the opinion of his grandfather and of Bismarck, chiming as it did with the new impulses of militarism that had risen so strongly within him, and being re-echoed, as it was, from the lips of all his friends.
But the event of this brief Regency which most clearly marked the chasm separating the Crown Prince from the Junker circles of his son’s adoption, was the appointment of Dr. Friedberg to high office. And this is particularly worth studying, because its effects are still felt in German social and political life.
Dr. Friedberg was then a man of sixty-five, and one of the most distinguished jurists of Germany. He had adorned a responsible post in the Ministry of Justice for over twenty years, and had written numerous valuable works, those relating to his special subject of prison reform and the efficacy of criminal law in social improvement standing in the very front rank of literature of that kind. His promotion, however, had been hopelessly blocked by two considerations; he was professedly a Liberal in politics and a close friend of the Crown Prince and Princess, and, what was still worse, he was a Jew.
On the second day of his Regency, Frederic astounded and scandalized aristocratic Berlin by appointing Dr. Friedberg to the highest judicial-administrative post in the kingdom. To glance forward for a moment, it may be noted that when old Kaiser Wilhelm returned to active power in December, he refused to remove Friedberg, out of a feeling of loyalty to his son’s actions as Regent. But he vented his wrath in another way by conspicuously neglecting to give Friedberg the Black Eagle after he had served nine years in the Ministry, though all his associates obtained the decoration upon only six years’ service. This slight upon the Hebrew Minister explains the well-remembered action of Frederic, when he was on his journey home from San Remo to ascend the throne after his father’s death:—as the Ministerial delegation met his train at Leipsic, and entered the carriage, he took the Black Eagle from his own neck and placed it about that of Friedberg.
This action of the emotional sick man, returning through the March snowstorm to play his brief part of phantom Kaiser, created much talk in Germany three years ago, and Friedberg, upon the strength of it, plumed himself greatly as the chief friend of the new monarch. He was the first Jew ever decorated by that exalted and exclusive Black Eagle—and during the short reign of ninety-nine days he held himself like the foremost man in the Empire.
It is a melancholy reflection that this mean-spirited old man, as soon as Frederic died, made haste to lend himself to the work of blackening his benefactor’s memory. He had owed more to Frederic’s friendship and loyalty than any other in Germany, and he requited the debt to the dead Kaiser with such base ingratitude that even Frederic’s enemies were disgusted, and, under the pressure of general disfavour, he had soon to quit his post. But enough of Friedberg’s unpleasant personality. Let us return to 1878.
The Regent’s action in giving Prussia a Jewish Minister lent an enormous original impulse to the anti-Semitic movement in Berlin, which soon grew into a veritable Judenhetze. This Jewish question, while it ran its course of excitement in Germany, completely dwarfed the earlier clerical issue, just as it in turn has been submerged by the rising tide of Socialistic agitation. But though the anti-semitic party has ceased to exert any power at the polls the feeling back of it is still a potent factor in Berlin life.
In the new Berlin, of which I shall speak presently, the Jews occupy a more commanding and dominant position than they have ever had in any other important city since the fall of Jerusalem. For this the Germans have themselves largely to blame. The military bent of the ascendant Prussians has warped the whole Teutonic mind toward unduly glorifying the army. The prizes of German upper-class life are all of a military sort. Every nobleman’s son, every bright boy in the wealthier citizens’ stratum, aspires to the uniform. The tacit rule which excludes the Jews from positions in this epauletted aristocracy drives them into the other professions. They may not wear the sword: they revenge themselves by owning the vast bulk of the newspapers, by writing most of the books, by almost monopolizing law, medicine, banking, architecture, engineering, and the more intellectual branches of the civil service.