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| ISBN-13: | 9780752499284 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 07/22/1999 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 255 |
| Sales rank: | 190,132 |
| File size: | 962 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Kaiser Wilhelm II
Germany's Last Emperor
By John Van der Kiste
The History Press
Copyright © 2013 John Van der Kiste,All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-9928-4
CHAPTER 1
The Young Prince
Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia was born on 18 October 1831 in the Neue Palais, Potsdam. He was the first child of Wilhelm, second in line to the throne of Prussia after his father, King Friedrich Wilhelm III, and eldest brother, Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, and Augusta, daughter of the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar.
Wilhelm and Augusta had been married in June 1829. For some time he had been in love with Princess Elise Radziwill, a member of the Polish aristocracy deemed of insufficiently noble birth to marry a Hohenzollern of Prussia. Having declared solemnly that he would never give his heart to another, the Prince obediently proposed to Augusta, who accepted him with a dutiful lack of enthusiasm that matched his own. He was a Prussian soldier through and through, while she had been brought up at the liberal court of Weimar, devoted to music, literature and art. Those who knew her well predicted, all too accurately, that her life in philistine Prussia would not be happy.
Husband and wife had little in common, and by the time of their son's birth they had developed such a mutual aversion that they were leading almost separate lives. It was impossible for them to stay in the same room for long without quarrelling. Though the heir apparent, Wilhelm's elder brother and his wife Elizabeth, had not managed to produce a child, Wilhelm and Augusta showed no undue concern with ensuring the succession. Seven years later, in December 1838, a daughter named Louise was born, and Augusta declared that she had fulfilled her marital duty. In June 1840 King Friedrich Wilhelm III died after a reign of forty-three years. His eldest son succeeded him, taking the title of Friedrich Wilhelm IV. As heir apparent, Wilhelm assumed the title of Prince of Prussia and his eight-year-old son became heir presumptive.
Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, or 'Fritz', as the family called him throughout his life, was a lonely child. His unimaginative father only took a perfunctory interest in him, adamant that he should grow up to be a good soldier but little more. A conventional upbringing was supervised by nurses and governesses until the age of seven, when he was entrusted to a military governor and tutor. Always closer to his mother, he took after her in many ways, particularly in his love of reading and later a liberal outlook on the issues of the day. When he was eighteen he astonished the reactionary General Leopold von Gerlach, who had told him how he envied the young man his youth 'for he would no doubt survive the end of the absurd Constitutionalism. He was of opinion that a representation of the people would become a necessity, and I endeavoured to make it clear to him that Constitutionalism did not necessarily follow upon the absence of Absolutism.'
In August 1845 Queen Victoria of England and Prince Albert visited the Prussian royal family at Aachen and were guests of honour at a special banquet. Thirteen months later Augusta was invited to stay with them for a week at Windsor. Acquaintance soon ripened into mutual friendship, and with it Albert's vision, inspired largely by his Uncle Leopold, King of the Belgians, and mentor Baron Christian von Stockmar, of a Prussia allied to Britain, at the head of a united, constitutional Germany. Who better to reign over this Greater Germany than their friend's son Friedrich, as King or even Kaiser, and his consort – their beloved eldest child 'Vicky', Victoria, Princess Royal?
In May 1851 Prince Albert's Great Exhibition, a tribute to the industrial and artistic skills of peacetime Britain and her empire, opened in London. Taking their pride of place as guests were the Prince of Prussia, who had come with great reluctance, his wife and son. The ten-year-old Princess Royal was something of a child prodigy. Almost as soon as she could read she was fluent in French and German as well as English, and she shared her father's intellectual, artistic and political interests. She acted as a very knowledgeable guide as she showed Friedrich around the exhibits. By the time he and his parents were back in Berlin, he was as firm in his Anglophile inclinations as his mother. While he could hardly have been in love with the vivacious youngster who had escorted him around with such enthusiasm, he must have realized that a tentative future was being planned for him by the elder generation.
In September 1855 Friedrich was invited to Britain again, this time without his parents, to stay with Queen Victoria and the family at Balmoral, their Scottish Highland home. He had parental permission to propose to the princess, now a very forward fourteen year old, and probably did not dare to return home without having done so. On 29 September they all went out riding with the young couple lagging behind. Friedrich picked a sprig of white heather as an emblem of good luck, telling Victoria nervously as he presented it to her that he hoped she would come to stay with him in Prussia – always. On the day after his departure, Albert wrote to tell Baron Stockmar of the week's events, adding that the young people were 'ardently in love with one another, and the purity, innocence, and unselfishness of the young man have been on his part equally touching'.
As the bride-to-be was still so young, there was no question of an immediate official announcement of the engagement, though disapproving tongues wagged in Berlin and the news leaked out within a few days. In a leading article (3 October) The Times attacked the engagement as 'unfortunate', calling Prussia a 'wretched German state', and the Hohenzollerns 'a paltry German dynasty'. When the betrothal was announced to the courts of Europe in April 1856 a rising young conservative politician, Otto Bismarck, then Prussian representative at the German Bundestag in Frankfurt, summed up the prevailing view in Berlin in a letter to General Gerlach: 'If the Princess can leave the Englishwoman at home and become a Prussian, then she may be a blessing to the country. If our future Queen on the Prussian throne remains the least bit English, then I see our Court surrounded by English influence. ... What will it be like when the first lady in the land is an Englishwoman?'
The wedding was scheduled to take place in January 1858, two months after the bride's seventeenth birthday. In Berlin the Court had taken it for granted that their future King would lead his consort up the aisle there. Queen Victoria had decided otherwise, as she informed Lord Clarendon, her Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (25 October 1857): 'Whatever may be the usual practice of Prussian princes, it is not every day that one marries the eldest daughter of the Queen of England. The question therefore must be considered as settled and closed.' Three months later to the day, Monday 25 January 1858, families and guests gathered in the chapel at St James's Palace where Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, just promoted to the rank of major-general of the Prussian First Infantry Regiment of Guards, led his trembling bride, radiant in a dress of white silk trimmed with Honiton lace, to the altar. After a two-day honeymoon at Windsor Castle for the couple, 'two young innocent things – almost too shy to talk to one another' in the bride's words, they returned to Buckingham Palace to join the family again, and then to Gravesend for their departure on the yacht Victoria and Albert to Prussia.
They entered Berlin on 8 February, a bitterly cold day. Wearing a low-cut dress without any wrap or coat for extra warmth, the quietly shivering Princess immediately disarmed Queen Elizabeth of Prussia, who had had no enthusiasm for her nephew's 'English marriage'. She asked the girl if she was not frozen. 'Completely, except for my heart, which is warm,' was the tactful answer. They settled in the Berlin Schloss, a shock for a young woman so used to English standards of comfort and cleanliness. There was a constant stench of bad drains, no bathrooms or running water, the beds were infested with bugs and long-disused rooms were knee-deep with dead bats. The Princess's in-laws were an unwelcoming, unprepossessing crowd, from the prematurely senile King, the embittered Anglophobe Queen Elizabeth, the ever-bickering regent and his wife, to the loud-mouthed, heel-clicking princes who unashamedly regarded their wives as second-class citizens, brood mares and nothing more.
By early summer the Princess was expecting a child. Neither of the prospective grandmothers seemed to be pleased, Queen Victoria rather ungraciously calling it 'horrid news' which made her 'feel certain almost it will all end in nothing'. The Princess was unwell throughout autumn and winter, but her physician Dr Wegner refused to believe there were grounds for concern, as did Queen Victoria's own physician, Dr James Clark, when he was sent to examine her. He insisted blandly that everything would revert to normal once the baby was born. Only her experienced midwife, Mrs Innocent, had any idea of the horrors in store. Arriving in Berlin soon after Christmas 1858, she took one look at the expectant princess and feared that they were 'in for trouble.'
Precisely what happened at Unter den Linden at the childbed of Princess Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia will probably never be known. Amid all the conflicting accounts of events, only one thing can be said with certainty – that the doctors and physicians were retrospectively involved to a considerable degree in covering up a mismanaged birth which nearly cost the lives of mother and child. The assertion that Queen Victoria distrusted most of the German doctors and sent Dr Eduard Martin, a German accoucheur who had however proved his ability by attending her own last pregnancy in 1857, is less likely than the theory that Prince Wilhelm took Baron Stockmar's advice and engaged the services of Dr Martin, at that time chief of obstetrics at the University of Berlin, as the man best qualified to assist. There was evidently some professional jealousy between both men, and Wegner, more courtier than physician, hesitated to jeopardize the sensibilities of his royal patient by conducting the necessary examination – even at the risk of letting nature take its course by allowing her and her child to die. Mortality in childbirth was not uncommon, and it was unlikely that his professional reputation in Berlin would have been damaged if this had been the outcome.
When the Princess's labour began shortly before midnight on 26 January, Dr Wegner, Dr Clark, at least one other German doctor (though no names have been mentioned in subsequent reports and accounts), the midwife, Countess Blücher and Countess Perponcher, a lady of the bedchamber, were on hand, and the father-to-be was also present. Countess Blücher, an Englishwoman married to a German, was a confidante of Queen Victoria, Princess Augusta, and one of the few women in Berlin whom Princess Friedrich Wilhelm could trust implicitly. It was evidently thanks to the Countess that the mother-to-be had a badly needed crash course in the 'intimacies' of childbirth that Queen Victoria, with her disgust for anatomical details, had never been able to bring herself to impart to her daughter. Wegner scribbled a note summoning Dr Martin at once, but it was given to a servant who posted it instead of delivering it by hand – whether out of carelessness or for more sinister reasons was never established. As a result it did not reach Dr Martin's residence until 8 a.m. the next day, after he had already left on his rounds. Two hours later he was getting into his carriage for the university lecture hall when he received the note with the rest of his morning mail. Simultaneously another footman appeared, summoning him to the palace at once.
To his horror Dr Martin found Dr Wegner and his German colleague or colleagues in a corner of the room while the distraught Prince Friedrich Wilhelm held his semi-conscious wife in his arms, having put a handkerchief into her mouth several times to prevent her from grinding her teeth and biting herself. One of the doctors told him resignedly, in English, that it was no use, 'the Princess and her child are dying'. At the sound of voices the Princess opened her eyes, and from her expression Dr Martin was convinced that she had understood. It was thanks to his grim determination that the mother lived, as did the son to whom she gave birth minutes later. Statistically the odds had been heavily against him. That same year, 98 per cent of German babies born in the breech position, as this one was, were stillborn.
'In truth I could not go through such another', Dr Clark wrote to Queen Victoria later that week. The young mother wrote to Queen Victoria that Dr Wegner had showed 'a great deal of tact, discretion, feeling during the whole time ... but I do not know what I should have done without Sir James', while as for Dr Martin, to whom she had initially taken a violent dislike, he was 'an excellent man & I feel the greatest confidence in his skill', but she could never absolve him completely from blame for the 'bungling way' in which she was treated. Wegner claimed the credit for bringing her and her son through the whole business, which he hardly deserved. Exhausted by her ordeal, she was confined to bed for a month. By the time she had recovered, it was too long after the event for her to realize who had genuinely saved her life. Some sixty years later, a war-weary continent might have had good reason to rue the doctors' devotion to duty, at least where their part in saving the baby was concerned.
At 3 p.m. 101 salutes were fired to announce the arrival of a new prince, third in line to the throne of Prussia. Newspaper editors in their offices had been alerted to the potential tragedy nearby by a messenger sent by the despairing doctors. Only as the echoes died away did they realize that Her Royal Highness Princess Friedrich Wilhelm's obituary could be put on hold. Meanwhile, crowds stood around in the falling snow, patiently awaiting the news. In his excitement the war veteran Field-Marshal Wrangel strode out on to the palace balcony to tell them optimistically that the infant was 'as sturdy a little recruit as heart could wish to see!'.
Dr Martin's grim report, written a fortnight later, was closer to the truth when he called the baby 'seemingly dead to a high degree'. All the doctors concentrated on trying to save the mother. Her child was handed to a German midwife, Fraulein Stahl, who repeatedly smacked the tiny bundle until his lungs began to function and he started crying. Wrapped carefully in his layette, he was then presented to his paternal grandparents and a circle of courtiers who admired him and congratulated the shattered father on having ensured the succession for another generation.
Three or four days after the birth Mrs Innocent drew Dr Martin's attention to the baby's left arm, hanging lifelessly from the shoulder socket. The father was told at once. When he asked the German doctors, they reassured him that the damage was only temporary paralysis which would improve with a little gentle massage at first, followed by exercises at a later stage.
What was the effect of the child's disability on his subsequent character? In his own memoirs, written and published sixty-seven years hence, he noted with admirable sang-froid that his arm 'had received an injury unnoticed at the time, which proved permanent and impeded its free movement'. Even when he was an adult it remained about 6 in shorter than the right. Adorned with heavy rings, the hand was perfectly formed and looked healthy apart from an ugly brown mole, but it was too weak to grip or hold anything heavier than a piece of paper. It would just go into his coat pocket, where he could keep it out of sight. Throughout his life few photographs showed his left arm clearly, let alone the hand; from an early age, the art of concealing it from the camera lens became second nature to him. At meals he could not manage an ordinary knife and fork, but his bodyguard always carried a special combined one, while the person sitting next to him discreetly cut up his food. As if to compensate, his right hand had an iron grip, something he would often exploit as an adult when greeting people for the first time with a vice-like handshake, sadistically turning the rings on his fingers inwards first so as to add to the other person's discomfort. If these men or women were English, he laughed heartily at their winces as he made jibes about 'the mailed fist'.
The injuries were not confined to an undeveloped hand. His neck had also been damaged at birth – as the arm and hand muscles and nerves were all torn from the vertebral column in the neck during the final stages of delivery, his head was tilted abnormally to the left, and the cervical nerve plexus was subsequently damaged. The hearing labyrinth of the left ear was defective, resulting in partial deafness from childhood and lifelong problems with balance, probably as a result of damage to part of the brain closest to the inner ear. Throughout adolescence and early manhood he suffered from alarming growths and inflammations of the inner ear, and at the age of forty-seven he underwent a major operation which left him deaf in the right ear as well.
A theory that lack of oxygen in the first few minutes of life caused some degree of irreversible brain damage can neither be proved nor ruled out. In the case of a child whose closest antecedents numbered at least two cases of severe mental instability, it was a worrying possibility. Perhaps one can attach undue importance to the fact that the boy's great-great grandfathers, Tsar Paul of Russia on his father's side, and King George III of England on that of his mother, had been considered insane in their latter years, as well as the fact that the then King of Prussia, the boy's childless great-uncle, King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, was likewise so mentally enfeebled by this time that he had little perception of events around him. Nevertheless the theory of brain damage, or insanity, if not a disquieting combination of both, cannot be disregarded. Not for many years was King George III's 'madness' more correctly ascribed to a combination of senile dementia and porphyria, an inherited constitutional metabolic disorder which, recent evidence suggests, may have been passed down to the Princess, and in turn to her eldest daughter and possibly this eldest son as well. When Prince Friedrich Wilhelm and his father were told of the baby's disability, the unsympathetic grandfather remarked coldly that he was not sure whether congratulations on the birth of a defective Prince were in order.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Kaiser Wilhelm II by John Van der Kiste. Copyright © 2013 John Van der Kiste,. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface,1. The Young Prince,
2. Marriage and Responsibility,
3. The Young Kaiser,
4. 'A Great Ruler and a Sensible Man?',
5. The Quill and the Sword,
6. The Approaching Storm,
7. The Kaiser at War,
8. The Squire of Doorn,
Genealogical Tables,
Notes,
Bibliography,