“William.”[18]
On Thursday, November 1st, I told the Prince, at lunch, that I would either immediately or next morning return him the papers, sorted and arranged. He replied, however, that he had found some more which belonged to the collection. He took me with him to his study, and handed them to me for arrangement, adding that there were very many more at Varzin, a whole box full, including private letters of historic significance. I should also go through these later on, and put them into chronological order.
On the morning of Friday, the 2nd of November, I read, sorted, and numbered new documents, which were afterwards put into a fresh envelope. Among these was the announcement of March, 1877, by the Emperor William, that he had appointed Bismarck Hereditary Grand Huntsman of Pomerania, reports respecting the illness of the Crown Prince, afterwards Emperor Frederick, from San Remo, Charlottenburg, and Potsdam, a letter from the Emperor William II. to Bismarck, transferring him to the second regiment of Guards, a telegram from the same, dated October 21, 1888, expressing his satisfaction at his journey to South Germany, Vienna, and Rome, whence he had just returned, and his thanks for the Chief’s counsels, which had been justified by his experience while away, and, finally, the letter already alluded to from the Empress Augusta. Nothing of importance among them.
At midday, before lunch, I personally handed over to the Chief the envelopes containing the papers. He appeared to have looked through them in the afternoon, as, when he was passing by in the evening, before dinner, as usual, with his two dogs, he gave me his hand and thanked me, expressing his surprise that I had been able to deal with such a mass of letters and papers in so short a time. I said if he wished to have those at Varzin also arranged, and could find no more suitable person to do it, I should be glad if he would let me know when he was next going to his estate in Further Pomerania, so that I might come there and complete my task. I should be delighted to serve him and learn something for myself at the same time. Rottenburg was absent from dinner. He had gone to Hamburg to meet some relatives. During dinner there was some talk of a Herr von Bülow, who had been the Chief’s guest at lunch. I ascertained that in this gentleman I had had before me the famous leader of the Lauenburg nobility, to whom Bismarck had clearly explained his standpoint, first on the Ratzeburg Lake, and again on taking the oath of allegiance in the church there. He is much more harmless than I had fancied him. The Chief said: “I should have invited him to remain to dinner, and he doubtless expected it, but he is so tedious that I did not know what to do with him during the five hours before dinner.” Then, after referring to the letters of the Crown Prince in 1863, which I had arranged, and to his own pencil notes, he came to speak of the Crown Prince himself. I said: “Absalom! And from what you wrote on the back you doubtless wrote him in reply that you did not intend to be ever included among his Ministers.” “Yes,” he rejoined, and the quotation Leicht fertig ist die Jugend mit dem Wort! (Youth is hasty in its judgments). He then gave a survey of the various phases of the Crown Prince’s attitude towards himself in the course of his life. “First, in 1848 or 1849. At that time he was still very thin and lanky. He showed great attachment to me, and, when they forbade him to do so at Potsdam, he used to try to meet me in the dusk of the evening and shake hands with me. Then the rude letter of 1863; afterwards, since 1864, in Flensburg, better. Then again Liberal counsels, Augustenburg sympathies, the Geffcken and Friedberg introductions, and his siding with Cumberland.” I said: “The Englishwoman, the Guelph.” We then spoke of the latter, also over our coffee, when the Princess said she could be very amiable when she liked, as she herself had experienced; a statement which the Chief also confirmed from his own experience. (...)
On Saturday I took leave of the Prince and Princess in the dining-room, after I had fulfilled my promise to the little Rantzaus to go with them to see a “house” that they had begun to build on the roadside leading to Dassendorf. I suggested some architectural improvements, and the eldest one, with childlike politeness, thanked me for the “good advice I had given them,” and hoped I would soon come back again. A prospect of doing so was held out to me on my taking leave at the house. The Chief said, as he was shaking hands: “Adieu, Büschlein, perhaps we shall resume our business soon at Varzin. But I must first return to Berlin.” The Princess asked me to present her compliments to Bucher, and the Countess came down to accompany me to the station with her children. But first she showed me the handsome clock and writing-table presented to her father by the German manufacturers, and gave me a porcelain penholder from one of the drawers as a souvenir.
On Sunday, the 10th of February, 1889, I received through a Chancery attendant an appointment to call upon the Chief at 3 P.M. I appeared punctually at the hour named, in his antechamber. Minister Bötticher was called into the Prince before me, and I talked to Rottenburg until my turn came. On entering the room I found the Prince in uniform. He asked about my health, and I inquired as to his. He complained of insomnia, and said he could no longer get any sleep without artificial means. On his then asking me what I had been doing in the interval, I mentioned the Grenzboten article on his attitude and that of the Crown Prince at the Versailles negotiations with the Bavarians, and he expressed a wish to see it, and said: “I should like you to add something to it, and to return to Geffcken’s extracts from the diary of the Crown Prince, or more correctly from one of the three or four diaries of the war, and of later years. A diary is a series of daily notes in which one writes down immediately afterwards what he has ascertained and experienced, just as a tourist does; and that too is the character of the first original diary. It is short, and as was natural enough in war time, it deals mainly with military affairs, and contains scarcely any political considerations. The others are interpolated later, from conversations which he had with good friends, or those whom he considered to be such—Geffcken, Roggenbach, &c. Thus he imagined that he had thought of all these things himself, as far back as 1870. English letters and influences will also have affected him. I say he imagined that and believed it, because he was a man who was very devoted to the truth. The good friends were malcontents, ambitious place hunters, and intriguers, people who felt that they had a vocation for great things, who knew more and could do better than the Government, and who would very willingly have lent a hand if they had only been allowed to do so. They were men of unappreciated talent, the wallflowers, the pettifogging attorneys and quacks of politics. He showed them the diary, and they made their observations upon it, which he then inserted. They found that in this shape it would come in usefully in the future. That accounts for the various transformations it underwent. The Crown Prince, like all mediocrities, liked copying, and other occupations of the same sort, such as sealing letters, &c. And he had time enough for it, as the King kept him apart from almost all political work, seldom or never spoke to him on such matters, and would not allow me to make any communication to him on subjects of the kind. From 1863 onward there was an uninterrupted struggle between the two, in the course of which there were several violent scenes when the Crown Prince was pulled up sharply, and he (imitating the gesture) cast up his eyes and raised his hands in despair. It was the same at Versailles in connection with the Emperor question, where the most gracious Master would not at first hear a word of our proposals, and got so angry on one occasion that he brought down his fist violently upon the table and the inkstand nearly flew out of the window. And here you may supplement the report in the diary as to this incident. Fragmentary and incomplete in every respect, it leaves out the first act in the negotiations, in which I had to wean the Crown Prince of the notion, which doubtless originated at Baden, that the Emperor idea was un-German and would damage the country. He was thinking only of the mediæval emperors, the Roman expeditions, and Charles V. For that reason he wished to have only a King of Germany or of the Germans, while the other three kings were to resume the title of Dukes—Duke of Bavaria, of Suabia and of Saxony. And to this he added the idea of coercion—they should be invited to Versailles and once we had got him there it was to be a case of needs must when the devil drives (jetzt friss Vogel oder stirb). I replied to him that that would be treacherous, disloyal and ungrateful, and that I would not lend myself to it, as, moreover, it would have no permanency. No friendly persuasion could possibly induce the Kings to submit to this degradation. I then pointed out to him the advantages of the Emperor idea, somewhat in the same way as I did afterwards in my letter to the King of Bavaria. The Kings would prefer to subordinate themselves to a fellow-countryman, who bore the title of German Emperor and to grant him certain rights in war and peace, than to a King of Prussia, who would only be a somewhat more powerful neighbour. Among the people, however, the Emperors had left a deeper impression than had the few princes, who, after the time of Charlemagne, called themselves, like Henry the Fowler, German Kings. In the restoration of the Empire they looked forward to the Emperor as the keystone of the arch. The Emperor still sits enthroned in Kyffhäuser in North Germany, and in the South German Untersberge. This idea should not be connected with that of a Roman Emperor, Roman expeditions or any pretensions to universal sovereignty would be against the true interests of the nation. It was, on the contrary, a purely national idea which the Emperor would represent and which we also had in view, the idea of unification after discord and decay, of new power and security through unity, of the concentration of the whole people upon the same objects. As far back as 1818 such ideas were held by the students’ associations, and in 1848 they found expression in the Paulskirche. In 1863 Austria had something similar in view with her draft constitution to be laid before the Congress of Princes, only her first thought was for her own interests.” “Later, on the foundation of the North German Confederation there was some talk of an Emperor of the Confederation, and the idea was only dropped because it would have led to a division and because in such circumstances Bavaria and Würtemberg would certainly not have joined us then, nor probably later on. For similar reasons I declined Lasker’s suggestion, in February, 1870, to admit Baden into the Confederation, because that would have been an attempt to exercise pressure upon her South German neighbours. The excessive number of Kings gradually convinced him, and he was then in favour of the Emperor idea. In the diary he has forgotten this whole first act. He writes as if he had discovered the idea and had been the first to put it forward, while it had long been kept alive, as a hope among the people, and he himself at first would not hear of it. Then came the second act, when it is true we acted together at the Prefecture in order to win over the old Master to our view. He at first vehemently rejected our proposal, and fell into a rage when we insisted. I asked if he wished to remain a neuter for ever. ‘What do you mean?’ he said crossly, ‘what sort of a neuter?’ ‘Why, the Presidency’ (Nun das Präsidium), I replied. But that also was of no avail. Then he agreed to it up to a certain point, if he were allowed to bear the title of Emperor of Germany. I explained to him that this would be opposed to the treaties, and would express territorial sovereignty over all Germany. He said the Tsar called himself Emperor of Russia. I denied this, and stated that his title was Russian Emperor. (He quoted the Russian term.) He maintained his opinion, however, until he asked Schneider, who was obliged to acknowledge that I was right.” On one occasion he mentioned in a report that Schleinitz had been present at these negotiations. I now asked: “What was he doing there? In what capacity was he present, as Minister of the Household, or as former chief of the Foreign Office, or in what other capacity?” He smiled and said: “As confidant of the Queen, who had sent him to oppose the bombardment and to persuade the King against it. He had nothing to do with the Emperor question. He had always been Augusta’s favourite, and while he was still a poor man she had on several occasions sent him money, 300 thalers, in order to enable him to visit her at Coblenz. It was solely through her favour that he became Minister.”
We then spoke of Sybel’s “Die deutsche Nation und das Kaiserreich” (The German Nation and the Empire), which he gave me; of Morier’s rude letter to Count Herbert, which was quite uncalled for, as there had been no charge made against that gentleman of having given direct information to Bazaine respecting the movements of the German troops; then of the wretched attitude of the German Liberal press, which in this—as in the Mackenzie, Geffcken, and other questions—took the side of every enemy of Germany and of German interests, whose hand was against him too; and finally about Samoa, in which connection the Chief censured the arbitrary conduct of the German Consul there. The conversation had lasted for about half an hour, and the Chancellor said as I was leaving that he would now try to get a little sleep. The article desired by him was written in the course of the following week, and was to appear in No. 8 of the Grenzboten under the title “The Emperor Question and Geffcken’s Diary Extracts.” I, however, first submitted a proof to the Chancellor for revision, and he made a number of alterations which Rottenburg dictated to me in his bureau in order that I might reproduce them in my copy. Thereupon I despatched the latter to Grunow (Saturday, February 16th), but a few hours later Rottenburg, with whom I had dined at Professor Scheibler’s, came back there with a message from the Chief requesting me to telegraph that the article should be returned for the present. Even after it had been toned down it was too dangerous for publication.
At noon on Sunday, the 17th of February, a Chancery attendant brought me a note from Rottenburg (begging me to call upon him at 3 o’clock at the Imperial Chancellerie. He had important instructions to give me).
On my going to see him at 3 o’clock he told me that the Chief now wished to have the article printed, but with a further slight change. We therefore telegraphed to Grunow to forward me that evening the proofs I had sent him, which I would return to him immediately. They arrived at 10 o’clock, when I at once took them to Rottenburg. We then inserted the last alterations of the Chief, and sent back the proofs to Grunow in a registered letter so that the article should appear in No. 8. Per tot discrimina rerum.