by Philipp Blom
England had had its Magna Carta, the Wars of the Roses and the execution of Charles I; Russian nobles had suffered under Ivan the Terrible and risen against Tsar Alexander I in 1825; the great lords of the Habsburg empire had always had a combative relationship with their regime; Hungary in particular continued to champ at the imperial bit; the Italians had lived through their Risorgimento, the Spanish through bloody civil wars, and the Poles through a centuries-long nightmare of invasions, revolutions and power struggles. France had seen the Fronde and several revolutions. There was only one European country, right at the heart of the Continent, in which aristocratic power and monarchical rule had been accepted without challenge or interruption: Germany. No revolution had ever brought its nobles down, no regicide or German Fronde had upset the way of things, nor would it do until 1944, when a group led by Claus Schenk, Count von Stauffenberg, would conspire and fail to topple the head of government, Adolf Hitler.
The rulers of the new German empire declared in 1871 emerged onto the global stage from provincial lives and put their faith in the traditional military ethos. Unlike their British counterparts, all but one of them (the eccentric Prince Günter Victor, head of the tiny, 100,000-soul statelet of Schwarzburg Rudolstadt in Thuringia) would appear in uniform on all public occasions and for official photographs. On the eve of the victory parade after the Austro-German War of 1866 the new chancellor of the Reich, Otto von Bismarck, had been made honorary chief of the 7 Schwieren Landwehr-Reiter, with the rank of major-general, expressly so that he could appear in appropriately military splendour. Even as the first civilian politician, he regularly wore uniform to parliamentary occasions, and always in the presence of the Emperor.
The state administration repaid its aristocracy handsomely for these continuing gestures of respect and hierarchy by protecting them from the cold winds of industrialization and global competition. Tax exemptions and tariff barriers ensured that farming remained a viable (if increasingly difficult) means of support for landowners, especially on the large East Prussian estates beyond the river Elbe. While most of the East Prussian Junkers whose military ethos formed the backbone of the Prussian monarchy were heavily mortgaged and often lived as poorly as their own servants, few of them were actually forced to sell their estates. Their revenues had declined, but the tough Junkers simply refused to give up, relying instead on a spirit of sturdy self-sufficiency. Frugal, proud and independent-minded, these Protestant nobles now made thrift almost as much a sacred principle as their ancient devotion to the fulfilment of duty.
Henning von Tresckow in Brandenburg, later to become one of the aristocratic conspirators against Hitler’s life in 1944, grew up on one of the many East Prussian country estates operating more or less at subsistence level. His mother, who managed the estate, kept expenditure to a minimum. ‘The pleasures they allowed themselves were modest ones,’ a friend later recalled. ‘When Frau von Tresckow had Christmas presents to buy for the village, she travelled up to Berlin on the train third class. While she was in the city she also avoided unnecessary expenses; most of the time she stayed the night in the cheapest hospice.’ Even the much grander and wealthier Counts von Dönhoff were seen travelling third class during these years. At the same time, many of the sons of the struggling lower aristocracy in Prussia were absorbed by the army, and officers’ salaries often helped pay for the upkeep of Junker country estates.
The special economic status of landowners in the Reich played its part in preserving the powerful Junker class in East Prussia, and under these favourable economic circumstances there was no crisis within the German aristocracy equivalent to those elsewhere in Europe, although by 1900 there was growing vocal opposition to aristocratic privileges by the Social Democrats, the largest party in the Reichstag. They faced an uphill battle, particularly since the voting system itself gave the landowning class a disproportionately large share of parliamentary seats, and also because both army and administration were studded with noble names: two thirds of the members of the government were of noble birth, as well as three quarters of all the army officers and 84 per cent of the generals. Until 1918, all Reich chancellors (Prince Otto von Bismarck, Count Leo von Caprivi, Prince Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst and Prince Bernhard von Bülow) were aristocrats.
His Highness Duke Ernst II of Saxony-Altenburg is a textbook example of German aristocratic life at its most secure. On an official photo, a post-card idyll, as was his little duchy in east-German Thuringia, he displays himself seated on an elaborately carved, thronelike armchair, surrounded by his adoring family: his wife, Duchess Adelheid (née Schaumburg-Lippe), and his children Georg Moritz, Friedrich Ernst, Charlotte and Elisabeth.
Happy families: Ernst, Duke of Saxony-Altenburg
with wife and children.
Life in these little states was often simple, and strongly paternalistic. ‘My father owned a car very early on,’ Georg Moritz, the heir apparent, would later recall. ‘He told his traffic minister that the roads would have to be improved as the ride was far too bumpy on the potholed country roads. The minister politely informed him that there was no money for such extravagances and so my father cordially invited him for a ride in his car. The minister could not very well refuse and my father went off at full speed.’ And after a little pause, he added, with quiet satisfaction: ‘The roads were fixed with astonishing rapidity.’
The little duchy of Saxony-Altenburg counted some 200,000 subjects. Altenburg, its capital, with 39,000 inhabitants, held the hundredth place on the list of Germany’s largest cities. The duchy’s land was mainly agricultural, although there was also some coalmining, and a railway network covering 185 kilometres. The duchy’s largest industrialist was a manufacturer of playing cards, still produced today under the Altenburg name, and still famous in Germany. Ernst II would be the last reigning monarch in Germany (he abdicated on 14 November 1918, five days after the Kaiser) and was to have the added distinction of being the only former German feudal ruler to live and die in the communist German Democratic Republic.
In the rigidly hierarchical world of imperial Germany, the young princes learned the subtleties of status from an early age; they would have absorbed the implications of their family’s rank and its relations with other ruling families almost along with their mother’s (or nurse’s) milk. Their family connections illustrate the deep-rooted strength of the German aristocracy.
The Saxe-Altenburgs were closely related to the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas (Georg Moritz himself was a discouraging 642nd in line to the British throne) and to many other great European families, including the royal houses of Belgium, Bulgaria and Portugal. The Duke’s sister Alexandra was married to the Grand Duke Constantine Nikolaievich Romanov, one of the sons of Tsar Nicholas I. Tsar Alexander II was therefore a cousin by marriage to the Duke, Tsar Nicholas II a cousin once removed. Another sister, Marie, had married Prince Albrecht of Prussia, a brother of Kaiser Wilhelm I and great-uncle of Kaiser Wilhelm II. All of them could trace their lineage back to the early Middle Ages, an ancestry which included, in the case of the Saxe-Altenburgs, the medieval emperors Charlemagne and Frederick II, followed by a colourful crowd of thirteenth-century margraves: Albrecht the Proud, Dietrich the Pressured and Dietrich the Pressurer (not father and son), Albrecht the Degenerate, Friedrich the Bitten, Wilhelm I the One-Eyed and George the Bearded. In 1900, the distant descendants of these intriguing princes still had the upper hand, but only just.
If life in the provinces retained a strongly paternalistic flavour, the degree of aristocratic influence and power was very different in different parts of the country, particularly in the more urbanized areas. The powerful northern seaports such as Hamburg, Bremen, Lübeck or Danzig (all belonging to the ancient mercantile Hanseatic league) were small republics which had been ruled for centuries by citizens’ senates. The Junker spirit dominant in the rural expanses of Brandenburg and East Prussia was alien to the industrial cities of the Catholic Rhineland (Cologne, Essen, Bochum, etc.), which was officially part
of Prussia, but whose traditions and ways of doing things were quite different.
Far from being the grovelling subjects often evoked by historians, large sections of the German middle classes had a great deal of self-confidence and looked down on the birth aristocracy as a class of degenerate, hidebound scroungers. The German Bürgertum, the middle class, defined its hierarchies and values in terms of education and civil merit, not noble birth. Prominent and wealthy Germans who were offered ennoblement often refused to accept it. The steel magnate Alfred Krupp declined a title (though his son would yield, and be known thenceforth as Prince von Bohlen und Halbach), as did the great pathologist and public health campaigner Rudolph Virchow. The Breslau industrialist Oscar Huldschinsky, who had earlier been graced with an invitation to sail on the imperial yacht, refused to accept the Kronenorden offered him, reportedly remarking, ‘if nobody has thought of honouring me for my contribution to German industry, I’m not going to accept a medal just because I’ve been out boating with the Kaiser.’ The Bürgertum was not, as Mommsen had so pessimistically written, ‘simply born to be ruled’.
While many middle-class people were imperialists and believed in the greatness of their culture and their fatherland, the recognition they were striving for was not the Emperor’s to give. German businessmen were more interested in the title of Kommerzialrat, the civilian, non-noble title of ‘Commercial Councillor’, an emblem of dependability and honourable conduct, than in a knighthood. Medical doctors had an eye on the title Sanitätsrat; lawyers and judges hoped to attain the grade of Justizrat, and so on. This hierarchy of civilian titles, as well as the academic appellations of Doktor and Professor, were taken so seriously in Germany that even wives were addressed with their husbands’ titles: Frau Kommerzialrat, Frau Professor, etc. Moreover, with proverbial German industriousness, these titles could be multiplied, in which case they would be used in full at every official occasion. Thus, a simple medical student could dream of working his way up to a practice, teaching at a university and receiving an honorary degree there, being eventually elected to the Reichstag and then retiring, at which point he would become known (and regularly addressed in writing) as Herr Reichstagsabgeordneter a.D., Sanitätsrat Professor Doktor Doktor (honoris causa), and even further, as far as his enthusiasm for committees, exams and official posts would carry him. In a characteristically German way, the burghers had emancipated themselves from the constraints of the old hierarchy by creating a new one.
Britain’s new, plutocratic nobles had no misgivings about their ennoblement and began to transform the aristocracy from within, bringing a degree of middle-class values and modernity wherever they went. They purchased country estates and installed modern plumbing and electric light - not for them the idea of genteel shabbiness. In the end they became a new kind of landed gentry, who worked in the city or in the factory towns, and only on the weekend took a train or motored out in one of the newfangled automobiles to their mansions in the country. The weekend countryman had been invented.
The great ennobled magnates of the time, men like Lord Guinness, with his brewery money, W. H. Smith, with his stationery chain, and Lord Leverhulme, with his soaps, bought land on an appropriately magnificent scale. Leverhulme, for example, was a grocer’s son, born William Lever in Bolton, Lancashire, where he had established a soap factory in 1886. Aided by business acumen and novel manufacturing processes, Lever’s palm oil soap bubbled into a huge fortune, and the entrepreneur went into politics. He was an avid art collector and put into practice his philanthropic intentions in Port Sunlight, a settlement built for his workers. In 1917 he was created Baron Leverhulme; five years later Viscount Leverhulme. In 1916 he bought a magnificent London palace from the Marquess of Stafford, renaming it Lancaster House. He also acquired (in 1918) several whole islands in the Outer Hebrides, and on one of them a quasi-ancestral pile, Castle Lewis.
Their new estates, however, were not much more than a bauble for these new men to play with, a welcome status symbol, but in the end, peripheral to the real business of life. During the Victorian period Benjamin Disraeli had been obliged to buy himself an estate simply in order to be considered prime ministerial material, for only the aristocracy, or at least the landed gentry, were expected to hold such positions. By 1911, times had changed so much that even the Conservative Party chose as its chairman Andrew Bonar Law, a Glasgow financier who had neither title nor estate, and who was not looking for either. For the old aristocrats, their estates had been the very reason of their existence; the homes of their ancestors, seats of their power. Now they had been reduced to a wealthy man’s ornament. Power had moved into the cities.
New Titles, New Wealth
If aristocratic accoutrements were amusements for the new nobility, members of the older nobility looked enviously at the money and energy that had created the fortunes of the day. Both the English King Edward and the German Kaiser Wilhelm II adored the company of this powerful, novel breed of friends, Edward most likely for hedonistic reasons, and Wilhelm because they embodied the surging economic power of his new empire.
As Prince of Wales, Edward and his social circle had already raised more than a few eyebrows among their conservative countrymen. The London society leader Lady Paget (herself somewhat ironically born Minnie Stevens in New York) may have remarked that the King was ‘always surrounded by a bevy of Jews and a ring of racing people’, but the Prince had merely read the signs of the time and allied himself with the winning team, the one batting for the new order: Lord Iveagh, who brewed beer, Baron Hirsch and Sir Ernest Cassel, Jewish bankers, or Sir Thomas Lipton, he of the tea bags - all extremely rich, first-generation noblemen. When the Kaiser heard that Lipton and his sovereign were sailing together in the Cowes Regatta he remarked, with a rare flash of wit, that the King had ‘gone boating with his grocer’.
All the same, despite his own obsessive quest for recognition and grandeur, the Kaiser’s tastes were also decidedly nouveaux riche. While the Prussian field marshal Graf Helmuth von Moltke had enjoined his countrymen to ‘be more than you seem’ - a statement echoed by the dictum of Graf Alfred von Schlieffen, father of the eponymous and disastrous plan: ‘Great achievement, small display: More reality than appearance’ - Wilhelm seemed to have inverted the rule. He spent madly and lived grandly, as his itinerary demonstrates. His court was a constant roadshow, alighting in Berlin and the Sans Souci Palace in Potsdam for only half the year. The spring was spent cruising in the Mediterranean, where Wilhelm also tried his hand at amateur archaeology (he kept a palace on Corfu), or on his estates in the Alsace and East Prussia. During the summer he would put out to sea again, this time in the North Sea and the Baltic, while during the autumn months the hunting season was far too tempting to be left to others: the Kaiser was never more proud than when photographed with interminable lines of slaughtered animals.
The court in Berlin did not approve. His Majesty’s lavish lifestyle offended the sense of frugality so important in the history of Prussia, whose greatest son, the legendary King Frederick the Great, had always dressed in simple uniforms, normally taking no more than a bowl of porridge even for his dinner. His less than heroic descendant had other ideas, as Baroness Spitzemberg, a lady-in-waiting at the court, recorded in her diary with obvious exasperation during one of Wilhelm’s Mediterranean sojourns, an archaeological dig in the dust of Greece: ‘H. M. [His Majesty] sends page-long, terribly expensive telegrams to the Archaeological Society about every last knee [of a classical statue] he finds…Bismarck was right: “no sense of proportion”.’
Full metal jacket: Wilhelm II in
uniform, his crippled left hand resting
on his sabre.
If the old guard was not happy about Wilhelm’s spending habits, the newly rich industrialists were less fussy and much less likely to lecture His Majesty on penny-pinching and proportion. Like his Uncle Bertie (Edward VII of England), the Kaiser preferred the company of jollier, less hidebound men, among them self-made moguls such as Alber
t Ballin, owner of the Hamburg America Line, the biggest of the age. Ballin had worked his way up from an inauspicious start as the son of a bankrupt Jewish cloth merchant. Perhaps characteristically, given his often schizophrenic attitudes, Wilhelm, who shared the antisemitic prejudices of his time, particularly appreciated the company of successful Jews like Ballin, the bankers Carl Fürstenberg and Paul von Schwarbach, the coal mogul Eduard Arnhold, or Walter Rathenau, chairman of the powerful AEG. This imperial entourage was quickly dubbed Kaiserjuden (Emperor’s Jews) by jealous members of the court. Other favourites included Philipp Eulenburg, a lawyer and career diplomat, the son of a former Prussian army officer. Though Eulenburg was not rich, Wilhelm enjoyed his company so much that he created him Prince Eulenburg; as we shall see later, the Prince’s later exposure as a homosexual would cause the Kaiser great embarrassment.
Queen Victoria’s eyes had been pressed shut by her grandson Kaiser Wilhelm, the uncomprehending representative of a new empire born out of nationalism and industrial thrust. Both he and the Queen’s successor, King Edward, were obsessed with the rituals of their rank, but much preferred the convenience and fun of modern life. Both were unaware of the contradiction they embodied, neither had a vision that matched the realities of his day.
Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance marches, composed for the coronation of Edward VII in 1902, have a brassy bluster which, even at the time, sounded like the echo of an earlier age, stretched and amplified to dignify the day. In fact, after decades of frustrated waiting in the shadow of his long-lived mother, Edward had almost failed to claim the throne at all. Only days before the coronation, appendicitis had come close to claiming the new King’s life, and the event had had to be postponed. Modern medicine saved the day, and as the rotund monarch waddled down the aisle of Westminster Abbey, with his current and former mistresses (including Sarah Bernhardt and the ‘delectable’ Alice Keppel) in a special place of honour, a relieved nation broke into a chorus of ‘Land of ho-ope and gloooo-ryyy’, the Edwardian empire’s new, if unofficial, hymn. The words to Elgar’s sumptuous, velvet-lined tune had been written by Arthur Benson, a painfully shy former Eton housemaster and Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, posthumously famous for the copious diary of 180 handwritten volumes in which he grappled with his tortured homosexuality. Elgar detested the popular new lyrics for their brashness. Benson was no unthinking imperialist himself, but the words he had written reflected one part at least of Britain’s national aspirations, as well as providing an ironic commentary on the stature of the gluttonous King: ‘Wider still and wider / Shall thy bounds be set / God, who made thee mighty / Make thee mightier yet.’ Attending the coronation, the Kaiser approved of the expansionist sentiments, though not of expansionist Britain itself. With political power shifting to the democratized, professionalized, quantified masses, the men at the top, in their gold-tasselled uniforms, were preparing to make a last stand of their own for the old order.
