The Three Emperors Page 3
Willy seemed a jolly, boisterous, affectionate small boy. Vicky described him, aged three, patting her face, saying, “Nice little25 Mama, you have a nice little face and I want to kiss you.” He slept in her bed when his father was away with the army, and she saw much more of him than most royal parents. “Willy is a dear,26 interesting charming boy,” Vicky wrote when he was seven, “clever, amusing, engaging, it is impossible not to spoil him a little. He is growing so handsome and his large eyes have now and then a pensive, dreamy expression and then again they sparkle with fun and delight.” He could also be aggressive and difficult. He hit his nurses; after a trip to England in 1864, his grandmother complained that he was thumping his27 aunt Beatrice—who was only two years older and afraid of him. “We have a gt.28 deal of trouble to keep him in order—he is so jealous of the Baby,” Vicky wrote after the birth of his sister Charlotte. Aged seven or so, on the beach at the Isle of Wight, he threw a furious tantrum29 and tried to kick an eminent gentleman and throw his walking stick into the sea. (The eminent gentleman, a former secretary of Prince Albert’s, tripped him up and spanked him.) On another occasion, at his uncle Edward’s wedding in England in 1863, aged four, he got bored, scratched the legs of his uncles Leopold and Arthur to get their attention, threw his sporran into the choir, and when scolded, bit one of his uncles in the leg.* W. P. Frith, celebrated painter of crowd scenes such as Derby Day, who had been commissioned to paint the occasion, muttered, “Of all the30 little Turks he is the worst.” To modern eyes, this seems like fairly typical obstreperous, spoilt toddler behaviour, but at the time it struck his mother and the British relatives as more than that—though this may have been just as much to do with their impossible expectations of how a young monarch-to-be should behave.
To add to the pressures and confusion there were the competing tugs of his English and German inheritances. The conflict was incarnated in his own name—to his mother and his English relations he was William, to his German relations and his country he was Wilhelm. The more Vicky felt alienated from her German environment, the more she denigrated her son’s German heritage. One ten-year-old visitor remembered Vicky reprimanding her children for dunking their cake in their tea: “None of your31 nasty German habits at my table!” She was determined to root out any signs of “that terrible32 Prussian pride” and she loathed the Prussian obsession with the army. When he was ten, Willy wrote plaintively to his English grandmother, “There were lately33 two parades where I marched towards the King. he [sic] told me that I marched well, but Mama said I did it very badly.” Vicky told her mother that in his miniature Hohenzollern uniform, he had looked like some “organ grinder’s34 unfortunate little monkey.”
Everything British, Vicky made it clear, was better. She told her son the Royal Navy was the greatest fighting force in the world and she dressed him up35 in a sailor outfit, aged two, feeling she’d won a great victory in managing to do it before he’d worn a Prussian army uniform. “He is so fond36 of ships,” she told her mother when he was five, “and I wish that to be encouraged as much as possible—as an antidote to the possibility of a too engrossing military passion.” In his teenage years, she wrote to him extolling England’s37 civilizing imperial mission, contrasting it with Germany’s foolish claims to be a player in Europe. She took him as often as possible to visit Queen Victoria at Osborne House, her holiday home on the Isle of Wight. Even after the First World War, beaten by the British and in exile, his memories of Osborne were golden. “How entirely like a second home to me was my grandmother’s house, and how England might well have been a second home to me also,” he wrote wistfully. “We were treated as children of the house.” He recalled a visit in 1871, aged twelve, when his uncle Arthur of Connaught took him round London and how impressed he was by the sharp figure Arthur cut in uniform; he remembered his favourite aunt Louise letting him play in her rooms and giving him sweets: he recalled going to see Nelson’s HMS Victory at Portsmouth in the queen’s paddle steamer and seeing British battleships off Spithead on the way. Osborne, he later claimed, was “the scene of my earliest recollections.”38 The family story went that on Willy’s first visit in June 1861, aged two-and-a-half, Albert had wrapped him in a towel and dandled him in it.
The Prince Consort died six months later, but the connection remained important to Willy and to his grandmother. “Albert,” she wrote39 a month after her husband’s death, “loved that dear child so dearly, felt so anxious about him, was so sure he would be clever—that it only adds to my love for … the sweet child … You know he is my favourite.” The fact that Willy would be king of the most powerful state in Germany also focused her attention. The queen had never been very keen on babies (“I don’t dislike babies,” she wrote, “though I think very young ones rather disgusting”), and by the time grandchildren came at a rate of three a year, admitted they were “a cause of mere anxiety for my own children” and “of no great interest either.”40 But Willy was the first, and the queen was indulgent with him as she was with few others. He called her “a duck,” and she pronounced him “full of fun and mischief, and in fact very impertinent, though he is very affectionate with it all.”41 In turn, Willy was fascinated by the queen. “She was a proper42 Grandmother,” he wrote approvingly. The two had a weakness for each other which would endure, despite everything.
It was impossible, of course, for Vicky to keep Prussian influences away from her children. Growing up in Berlin and Potsdam, which was appropriately both the military and leisure capital of Prussia, they were surrounded by the symbols of Prussian military might and ambition—parade grounds and drilling regiments—and they lived in the vast, rather chilly Neues Palais, built by Frederick the Great as an aggressive assertion of Prussian power (having built it, he decided it was a piece of architectural showing off and refused to live in it). A palace of hundreds of huge, echoing rooms, it fronted on to a parade ground. When Willy reached ten, his grandfather, now King Wilhelm of Prussia, began to show an interest in the boy, demanding that Willy turn up at military events and inviting him to dinner in his ostentatiously austere apartments where he slept on his old army camp bed, ate off a card table, and marked the level of the wine on the bottle to make sure the servants didn’t steal it. The king, who could be extremely charming when he pleased,* would talk about his Napoleonic campaigns and the grandson would listen, rapt. The criticism and expectation at home made his grandfather’s world very attractive to Willy. The king had a very different view of the obligations of royalty: he was uncomplicatedly absorbed in the army, in being Prussian, and to him royalty didn’t need a fancy education to prove itself worthy—it just was.
The king was a hero to his grandson: he had presided—with a little help from Bismarck—over a series of astonishing military successes during the 1860s, Willy’s first decade. By 1871, through aggressive campaigns and political manoeuvring, Bismarck had dramatically increased Prussia’s size and influence. In 1864 Prussia took Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark. In 1866 it routed Austria out of Germany during the Austro-Prussian War, annexed more German states and turned Willy’s father, Fritz, into a bona fide military hero, at the battle of Königgrätz. In 1871 the Franco-Prussian War left France defeated and Prussia with the provinces of Alsace-Lorraine. It also prompted the unification of Germany under Prussia’s leadership in 1871—and made an enduring enemy of France. The tension between the countries would be a dominating fact of European history for the next eighty years; for the moment, though, the Prussians were clearly triumphant. Nine days before Willy’s twelfth birthday his grandfather was crowned kaiser of a united Germany in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, in a piece of terrifying theatre stage-managed by Bismarck. Naturally, Willy followed the campaign and its aftermath avidly. To his eternal43 pride, he was allowed to ride behind his father on his triumphal progress through the Brandenburg Gate. It was hardly surprising that, despite her efforts, Vicky found “a certain receptiveness for the crude, narrow-minded, views of the military” in her son. She worried t
hat her father-in-law and the court were encouraging in Willy a “mistaken pride, in the idea that it was patriotic.”44 She worried about her son’s admiration for Bismarck. To her English family, however, she hotly defended the Prussian campaigns. As her brother Edward observed, in Germany there was no one more English and in England no one more German.
Vicky was determined her son wouldn’t grow up to be a stereotypical Prussian officer. Following her father’s example, she wanted him to be a new kind of prince: educated, self-aware, someone who would confound the forces of republicanism. She found him a group of playmates who came from backgrounds that were not exclusively Prussian aristocrat—ambassadors’ and businessmen’s children. At seven, when European princes traditionally left the nursery, Willy was handed over to George Hinzpeter, a very serious Calvinist liberal, who planned to implement the most contemporary ideas in education and to show Willy and his brother Heinrich some of the realities of modern life, so they would not “grow up in ignorance45 of the wants and interests of the lower classes.” Going to a real school was mooted. It’s hard to exaggerate how utterly unlike the average royal education this was: most European princes were handed over to a military governor to whom civilian tutors were subordinate; most were kept completely isolated from the world. It was an admirable plan in many ways, but the combination of Vicky’s expectations, her choice of Hinzpeter, and Willy’s emerging personality would be a damaging one. Perhaps also the contrast between the expectations of his mother and tutor and the fact that everyone else—the servants, the legendarily deferential Prussian court—treated him as a little god was confusing and unhelpful. Wilhelm would later claim that from the age of seven he had been forced into a regime of “perpetual renunciation.”46 In fact, the first few years were rather gentle: there was lots of travel, music and drawing, and unusual excursions to factories and working-class homes. Wilhelm liked to boast later that having seen “the grim poetry”47 of working-class life, “I thus learned to understand the German workman and to feel the warmest sympathy for his lot.”
But when Willy reached eleven, it all began to go wrong. Vicky’s criticisms took on an extra intensity. “He is very arrogant, extremely smug and quite taken with himself,” she wrote to Fritz a month before his twelfth birthday in December 1870, “is offended at the slightest comment, plays the injured party, and more than occasionally gives an impudent answer; furthermore he is unbelievably lazy and slovenly … On the other hand he is more alert and animated than all of his playmates, and is more caring and pleasant than all of the rest of them.” He was, she noted—as others would—quick and curious, but had no staying power. Hinzpeter was dissatisfied too. His teaching, he announced, particularly his attempts to mould the “inner development of mind and heart,” had thus far utterly failed. Rather than rethink the plan, they decided to ratchet up the pressure and the discipline. The regime became stricter and harsher. Hinzpeter described fourteen-year-old Willy’s “ill-omened self-adulation” and “the unpleasant trait of arrogance … [which] bolsters the indolence which nature has so generously conferred on him.” He called him lazy and conceited. “Evidence of positive goodwill towards anyone at all is nevertheless as rare as instances of heartless egoism are frequent … his almost crystal-hard egoism … forms the innermost core of his being.”48 It’s impossible to say whether Willy’s shortcomings were innate or an angry adolescent’s response to his mother’s and his tutor’s impossibly high standards, but these traits would gradually manifest themselves in the adult Wilhelm. Even so, his English uncle Bertie, seeing the nineteen-year-old Willy and his brother for the first time in several years in 1878, recorded, “It is impossible49 to find two nicer boys than William and Henry.”
Whatever the truth, the pressure that Hinzpeter and his mother put Willy under horribly backfired, and even Vicky had to admit that Hinzpeter might not have been the best person to have entrusted with the development of a sensitive, tricky teenage boy. A depressive, he seems to have become convinced that he was locked in a Manichean battle to mould Willy’s character, without being able to see that everything he was doing was making it worse. The plan was, as Wilhelm later wrote, to “grasp hold of the soul of the pupil … to ‘wrench’ it into shape.” Rather than realizing that at least part of Willy’s arrogance was an attempt to hold on to some shreds of self-confidence in the face of constant character demolition, Hinzpeter believed that what his charge needed was “humiliation.”50 It was decided in 1874 that Willy, aged fifteen, should be sent to a gymnasium—a boys’ secondary school. Ostensibly this was an unprecedentedly modern attempt to give the boy a chance to mix with his contemporaries. Its initiators had ulterior motives: Vicky saw it as a way of keeping Willy away from the kaiser’s influence; Hinzpeter, as a way of crushing his spirit as much as possible. Being with other boys would squash his “false estimation51 of his own ability.” At the same time Hinzpeter played a manipulative game, criticizing Vicky in front of Willy, while telling her and Fritz they were not sufficiently supporting him. Vicky worried, but having taken such a step into the unknown, she was fearful of sacking the navigator.
How Willy felt about all this is evident from his memoirs, written nearly fifty years later, which contain his famous description of being taught to ride—hampered, of course, by having only one usable hand. Hinzpeter put him on a horse and watched him fall off, despite the boy’s tears and pleadings, over and over, until he got his balance. “When nobody looked,52 I cried,” Wilhelm wrote. It seems likely that this never actually happened,* but clearly the emotions it described were real enough. “The impossible was53 expected of the pupil in order to force him to the nearest degree of perfection. Naturally the impossible goal could never be achieved; logically, therefore, the praise which registers approval was also excluded.” It could have been a description of his whole childhood. He began to retreat into an alternative reality when real life didn’t measure up—a habit that would become pronounced in adult life. And yet, in some respects he had succeeded spectacularly: by the time he reached adolescence, he was so adept with his withered arm that people often ceased to notice it. He could ride and shoot, he was physically robust. He couldn’t dress or cut his food without help, but then plenty of European royals were almost ludicrously dependent on their servants. One Russian grand duchess admitted that before the revolution she couldn’t button her own boots.54
Willy did not enjoy his two and a half years at the Lyceum Fredericianum, the gymnasium in the small, picturesque German town of Kassel which he attended with his brother Heinrich—who, regarded by all as nice but dim, was there mainly for company—supervised by Hinzpeter. The tutor worked him well beyond the normal school day, starting at 5 a.m. and finishing at 8 p.m., six days a week, while simultaneously letting everyone including Willy know that he didn’t think he was up to it. In fact, Wilhelm performed quite well in class and he got on with the other boys, but he was discouraged from getting too close to them. Hinzpeter insisted he should be addressed by the formal Sie, muttering all the while about the “poor boy’s55 isolation.” And royal etiquette meant that every time Wilhelm entered a room, one of his tutors noted, everyone was obliged to fall silent and stand still, then follow him around at a respectful distance. Despite the strains, Wilhelm was still most at ease and happy with his family. If anything, he seemed rather fixated on his mother—he sent her intense letters describing dreams in which her hands caressed him, and wrote of “what we will do56 in reality when we are alone in your rooms without any witnesses.” The letters were clearly deeply sexual, but they were also pleas for love and support. Vicky, flattered and confused, deflected them with jokes about being his “poor old Mama,” and she never came to rescue him.
Willy graduated from Kassel aged eighteen in 1877—he came tenth out of sixteen. Released from Hinzpeter and school, he immediately got as far from his mother’s influence as he could. Encouraged by his grandfather, he joined the 1st Regiment of Foot Guards, the grandest and most aristocratic regiment in Germany, an
d moved out of the family home. The officer corps was as much a social club as a training ground: duties were light and amusements were many. Willy found himself surrounded by young men of similar age and class, of right-wing nationalist views and a strong sense of comfortable entitlement, and within a culture in which, as one Berlin observer wrote, “He was the acknowledged57 idol of the younger military set, and the easy tool of Bismarck … and surrounded by flatterers.” Willy’s head was turned. He loved the 1st Foot: the all-embracingness, the male company, the constant activity, the practical jokes, standing at the head of a company feeling splendid—and he especially loved that his peers deferred to and flattered him. Potsdam, he said, was his “El Dorado.”58 After years of fourteen-hour workdays, he soon lost any interest in applying himself to anything for long, to his parents’ disappointment. At Bonn University, where he then spent two years, he dabbled in economics, physics, chemistry, history, philosophy and government, but mainly spent time at the Borussia, the university’s grandest duelling and drinking club, peopled by the sons of grand dukes. One of his university tutors commented, “Like all59 royalty who had been over-flattered in youth, the prince believed he knew everything without having learnt anything.” Hinzpeter concluded that his entire programme had been a “complete failure”60—though it was often said that it was from him that Willy had acquired a “coldness”61 of manner. Fifty years later Wilhelm still couldn’t decide whether he was grateful to his tutor, or hated him.
Unsurprisingly, Vicky saw his identification with the army as a pointed rejection, as indeed it was. “Before I entered62 the regiment,” he told a friend, “I had lived through such fearful years of unappreciation of my nature, of ridicule of that which was to me highest and most holy: Prussia, the Army and all of the fulfilling duties that I first encountered in this officer corps and that have provided me with joy and happiness and contentment on earth.” When his younger brother Waldemar died of diphtheria the following year, 1878, the family were extremely upset that Wilhelm seemed largely unconcerned. Vicky, he told an interviewer decades later, now looked at him with “bitter disappointment63 mingled with maternal solicitude.” The irony was that, having avoided—courtesy of his mother—the years of strict military training that a normal Hohenzollern might expect, Wilhelm had none of the disciplined mental habits or experience of a real Prussian officer. Or rather, he looked and played the part—perfectly turned out, moderate if not ascetic in his eating and drinking—but he had no habit of application. Just as he had been a dilettante student, so he was a dilettante soldier. His military adjutant,64 Adolf von Bülow, the experienced soldier seconded to see him through his army life, admitted that after five years in the 1st Foot, Wilhelm had completely failed to learn the true values of soldiery.