Vagabonding Through Changing Germany

by Harry Alverson Franck

The old caretaker had some silly little anecdote for almost every article he pointed out. He had taken thousands of visitors through the castle—it was never inhabited more than a month or two a year even before the war—and the only thing that had ever been stolen was one of the carved ivory table-croquet mallets, which had been taken by an American Red Cross nurse. I was forced to admit that we had people like that, even in America. In the royal chapel—now an American Protestant church—the place usually taken by the pipe organ served as a half-hidden balcony for the Kaiser, with three glaring red-plush chairs—those ugly red-plush chairs, no one of which looked comfortable enough actually to sit in, screamed at one all over the building—with a similar, simpler embrasure opposite for the emperor’s personal servants. The main floor below was fully militarized, like all Germany, the pews on the right side being reserved for the army and inscribed with large letters from front to rear—“Generalität,” “General Kommando,” “Offiziere und Hochbeamter,” and so on, in careful order of rank. Red slip-covers with a design of crowns endlessly repeated protected from dust most of the furniture in the salons and drawing-rooms, and incidentally shielded the eye, for the furniture itself was far uglier than the covering.

The most pompous of nouveaux riches could not have shown more evidence of self-worship in their decorations. Immense paintings of themselves and of their ancestors covered half the Hohenzollern walls, showing them in heroic attitudes and gigantic size, alone with the world at their feet, or in the very thick of battles, looking calm, collected, and unafraid amid generals and followers who, from Bismarck down, had an air of fear which the royal central figure discountenanced by contrast. Huge portraits of princes, Kurfürsten, emperors, a goodly percentage of them looking not quite intelligent enough to make efficient night-watchmen, stared haughtily from all sides. A picture of the old Hohenzollern castle, from which the family—and many of the world’s woes—originally sprang, occupied a prominent place, as an American “Napoleon of finance” might hang in his Riverside drawing-room a painting of the old farm from which he set out to conquer the earth. Much alleged art by members of the royal family, as fondly preserved as Lizzy’s first—and last—school drawing, stood on easels or tables in prominent, insistent positions. Presents from the Sultan were particularly numerous, among them massive metal tablets with bits in Arabic from the Koran. One of these read, according to the caretaker, “He who talks least says most.” Unfortunately, the Kaiser could not read Arabic, hence the particularly pertinent remark was lost upon him. In an obscure corner hung one of the inevitable German cuckoo clocks, placed there, if my guide was not mistaken, by a former empress in memory of the spot where she plighted her troth. Poor, petty little romances of royalty! Probably it was not so much coquetry as an effort to escape the pseudo-magnificence of those appalling rooms that drove her into the corner. How could any one be comfortable, either in mind or in body, with such junk about them, much less pass the romantic hours of life in their midst? I should much have preferred to have my Verlobungskuss in a railway station.

Only the library of the ex-empress, with its German, French, and English novels and its works of piety, showed any sign of real human individuality. Her favorite picture hung there—a painting showing a half-starved woman weeping and praying over an emaciated child, called “The Efficacy of Prayer.” No doubt the dear empress got much sentimental solace out of it—just before the royal dinner was announced. The Kaiser’s private sleeping-room, on the other hand, was simplicity itself—far less sumptuous than my own a few blocks away. He had last slept there, said the caretaker, in the autumn of 1914, while moving toward the western front with his staff.

“And all this belongs to the state now, since Germany has become a republic?” I remarked.

“Only a part of it,” replied my guide. “We are making up lists of the private and crown property, and his own possessions will be returned to the Kaiser.”

The outstanding feature of the visit was not the castle itself, however, but the attitude of this lifelong servant of the imperial owner. The assertion that no man is a hero to his valet applies, evidently, clear up to emperors. The caretaker was a former soldier in a Jäger and forestry battalion, born in the Thüringerwald fifty-six years ago, a man of intelligence and not without education. He had been one of hundreds who applied for a position in the imperial household in 1882, winning the coveted place because he came “with an armful of fine references.” To him the Kaiser and all his clan were just ordinary men, for whom he evidently felt neither reverence nor disdain. Nor, I am sure, was he posing democracy; he looked too tired and indifferent to play a part for the benefit of my uniform. The many gossipy tales of royalty, semi-nobility, and ignobility with which he spiced our stroll were told neither with ill feeling nor with boastfulness; they were merely his every-day thoughts, as a printer might talk of his presses or a farmer of his crops.

Wilhelm der Erste, the first Kaiser, was a good man in every way, he asserted. He had seen him die. He had been called to bring him his last glass of water. Bismarck and a dozen others were gathered about his bed, most of them kneeling—the picture of Bismarck on his knees was not easy to visualize somehow—“and the emperor died with great difficulty”—my informant demonstrated his last moments almost too realistically. The Kaiser—he who wrecked the Hohenzollern ship—was a very ordinary man, possibly something above the average in intelligence, but he did not have a fair chance in life. There was his useless arm, and then his ear. For forty years he had suffered atrociously from an abscess in his left ear. The caretaker had seen him raging mad with it. No treatment ever helped him. No, it was not cancer, though his mother died of that after inhuman suffering, but it was getting nearer and nearer to his brain, and he could not last many years now. Then there was his arm. No, it was not inherited, but resulted from the criminal carelessness of a midwife. For years he used an apparatus in the hope of getting some strength into that arm, tying his left hand to a lever and working it back and forth with his right. But it never did any good. He never got to the point where he could lift that arm without taking hold of it with the other. He grew extraordinarily clever in covering up his infirmity; when he rode he placed the reins in the useless left hand with the right, and few would have realized that they were just lying there, without any grasp on them at all. He kept that arm out of photographs; he kept it turned away from the public with a success that was almost superhuman. On the whole, he was a man with a good mind. “No one of average intelligence can help being a knowing man if he has Ministers and counselors and all the wise men of the realm coming to him every day and telling him everything.” But he had too much power, too much chance to rule. He dismissed Bismarck, “a man such as there is only one born in a century,” when he was himself still far too young to be his own Chancellor. He never could take advice; when his Ministers came to him they were not allowed to tell him what they thought; they could only salute and do what he ordered them to do. And he never understood that he should choose his words with care because they made more impression than those of an ordinary man.

It was only when I chanced upon his favorite theme—we had returned to his little lodge, decorated with the antlers and tusks that were the trophies of his happiest days—that the caretaker showed any actual enthusiasm for the ex-Kaiser. I asked if it were true that the former emperor was a good shot. “Ausgezeichnet!” he cried, his weary eyes lighting up; “he was a marvelous shot! I have myself seen him kill more than eight hundred creatures in one day—and do not forget that he had to shoot with one arm at that.” He did not mention how much better record than that the War Lord had made on the western front, nor the precautions his long experience in the “hunting-field” had taught him to take against any possible reprisal by his stalked and cornered game.

The Crown Prince, he had told me somewhere along the way in the oppressive royal museum, was a very nice little boy, but his educators spoiled him. Since manhood he had been “somewhat leichtsinnig”—it was the same expression, the old refrain, that I had heard wherever the Kaiser’s heir was mentioned—“and his mind runs chiefly on women.” In one of the rooms we had paused before a youthful portrait of Queen Victoria. “I have seen her often,” remarked my guide, in his colorless voice. “She came often to visit us, at many of the palaces, and the first thing she invariably called for the moment she arrived was cognac.” It may have been merely a little side-slap at the hated English, but there was something in that particular portrait that suggested that the queen would have made a very lively little grisette, had fate chanced to cast her in that rôle.

Bismarck was plainly the old servant’s favorite among the titled throng he had served and observed. “When the second Kaiser died,” he reminisced, “after his very short reign—he was a good man, too, though proud—he gave me a message that I was to hand over to Bismarck himself, in person. The long line of courtiers were aghast when I insisted on seeing him; they stared angrily when I was admitted ahead of them to his private study. I knocked, and there was a noise inside between a grunt and a growl”—some of our own dear colonels, I mused, had at least that much Bismarckian about them—“and after I opened the door I had to peer about for some time before I could see where he was, the tobacco smoke was so thick. He always smoked like that. But he was an easy man to talk to, if you really had a good reason for coming to see him, and I had. When I went out all the courtiers stared at me with wonder, but I just waved a hand to them and said, ‘The audience is over, gentlemen!’ Ah yes, I have seen much in my day, aber,” he concluded, resignedly, as he accompanied me to the door of his lodge, “alle diese gute Zeiten sind leider vorbei.”