The Three Emperors

by Miranda Carter

  Prussia’s highly professional army was the reason for its domination of Germany, and in many respects gave Prussia what political coherence and identity it had. It had long been dominated by the Junkers, and was the heart of Prussian conservatism. Almost all European aristocracies identified themselves with the army, but since the seventeenth century the Prussian aristocracy, more than any other, had been encouraged by its rulers to equate its noble status and privileges entirely with senior military rank. It was not unusual for boys of the Prussian ruling classes to wear military uniform from the age of six. History showed that war paid: Prussia had benefited territorially from every central European military conflict since the Thirty Years War in the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century Frederick the Great had doubled Prussia’s size in a series of vicious central European wars. Prussia’s intervention in the Napoleonic Wars had doubled its size again, making it the dominant power in Germany. But at the same time, Prussia’s military culture had arisen not simply from a desire to expand and conquer, but quite as much from the fact that the Prussian ruling class was haunted—obsessed even—by its country’s vulnerability in the middle of Europe, undefended by natural barriers, always a potential victim for some larger power’s territorial ambitions. Territorial expansion had constantly alternated with disaster and near annihilation. During the Thirty Years War, Prussia had lost half its population to disease, famine and fighting; the scar remained in folk memory. During the Napoleonic Wars, it had been humiliated, overrun and threatened with dismemberment while the French and Russians squared up to each other. Since then, Prussia had been hostile to France and carefully deferential to the Russian colossus next door. The ruling dynasties of Hohenzollern and Romanov had intermarried and even developed genuine friendships. Willy’s Prussian great-aunt Charlotte had married Tsar Nicholas I, and Willy’s grandfather, who would become King of Prussia and then Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany, enjoyed a long and close friendship with his son, Tsar Alexander II.

  The contradictions in Prussia mirrored the extraordinary heterogeneity of Germany and its states as a whole. Within its loose boundaries there existed a plethora of conflicting Germanys: the Germany that led the world in scientific and technological innovation, the Germany that was the most cultured, literate, academically innovative state in Europe—the Germany of Goethe, Leibnitz, the von Humboldt brothers, Bach and Beethoven—stood alongside the Germany of resolutely philistine Junkers. In East Elbia, the heartland of the Junker estates, disenfranchised peasants lived in almost feudal conditions, and yet at the same time Germany was the most industrialized place in Europe with some of the best labour conditions. Germany had some of the most hierarchical, undemocratic states in Europe, ruled by an embarrassment of self-important little princelings, and was also home to the largest and best organized Socialist Party in Europe. Southern, predominantly Catholic, Germany coexisted with northern, Protestant Germany. It seems entirely appropriate that Berlin, Prussia’s capital, with its vast avenues, seemed like a parade ground, while also being a centre for political radicalism, for scholarship, for a wealthy Jewish community.

  Prince Albert believed there was a battle going on for the soul and political future of Germany. “The German stands5 in the centre between England and Russia,” he wrote to his future son-in-law Fritz in 1856. “His high culture and his philosophic love of truth drive him towards the English conception, his military discipline, his admiration of the asiatic greatness … which is achieved by the merging of the individual into the whole, drives him in the other direction.” Albert also felt that in the post-1848 world, monarchy was under threat. He wanted to prove that good relations between monarchies created peace between countries. And he had come to the conclusion that princes must justify their status by their moral and intellectual superiority to everyone else.

  One of Albert’s projects had been to design a rigorous academic regime for his nine children to turn them into accomplished princes. His eldest daughter, Vicky—his favourite—responded brilliantly to it. She was clever, intellectually curious and passionate—qualities not always associated with royalty. Her younger brother Bertie—the future Edward VII—had suffered miserably under the same regime. Albert thought that, under the right circumstances, a royal marriage between Britain and Prussia might nudge Germany in the right direction, towards unification, towards a constitutional monarchy and a safe future for the German royal families. It might even bring about an alliance with Britain, an alliance which could become the cornerstone of peace in Europe. Albert resolved to send his clever daughter on a mission to fix Germany, by marrying Vicky to Friedrich Wilhelm Hohenzollern, nephew of the childless and increasingly doddery King of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, and second in line to the throne after his sixty-two-year-old father, who had already taken over many of his brother’s duties.

  Fritz, as he was called, was ten years older than Vicky, dashingly handsome, charismatic and an effective officer—so much the Wagnerian hero that in Germany he was actually known as Siegfried. The marriage, which took place in January 1858, looked good on paper—the heir of the rising Protestant German state marrying the daughter of the richest, stablest power in Europe. Unlike most arranged royal marriages, it worked even better in reality. Personally gentle, earnest and prone to depression—somewhat at odds with the emphatically blunt, masculine ideal of the Prussian officer—twenty-seven-year-old Fritz adored his clever seventeen-year-old wife, and she adored him. He also showed, Victoria and Albert noted approvingly, a liking for England and admirable liberal tendencies very much at odds with those of his father and the Prussian court.

  At the time, the plan of sending a completely inexperienced seventeen-year-old girl to unify Germany may not have seemed quite so extraordinary as it does now. The external circumstances looked promising. In 1858 the political balance in Prussia seemed to be held by the liberals: they had just won a landslide victory in the Landtag elections. Prussia’s king was elderly and had recently suffered a series of incapacitating strokes, and his heir, Fritz’s father, was sixty-two years old. Fritz and Vicky shouldn’t have to wait too long before they would be in control.

  That was the plan. It didn’t turn out that way. Firstly, Albert had been away from Germany a long time and didn’t understand how suspicious the Prussian ruling class was of Vicky’s Englishness, and how touchy about the prospect that larger powers might interfere in its country. “The ‘English’6 in it does not please me,” the future chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, told a friend, “the ‘marriage’ may be quite good … If the Princess can leave the Englishwoman at home.” Secondly, Vicky, though extremely bright, had no talent for politics, was hopelessly tactless and held fast to her Englishness. Thirdly, Fritz’s father turned out to be astonishingly long-lived, and appointed Otto von Bismarck, the greatest conservative European statesman of the late nineteenth century, his chief minister.

  It went wrong quite quickly. The Prussian court was not welcoming and was critical of Vicky’s forthright views and intellectual confidence. Prussian wives were supposed to be silent and submissive; there was none of the leeway allowed in Britain for an intelligent, educated woman to shine. It was said disapprovingly that Vicky dominated Fritz. She met intellectuals and artists, whether or not they were commoners, and this contravened the social strictures of court etiquette: princesses did not host salons or mix with non-royals. Bewildered and isolated, Vicky had no idea what to do. She responded with a social tone-deafness and complete lack of strategic tact which would become characteristic. She complained—imperiously and incessantly—about the philistine, rigid and deadly dull Prussian court; about the threadbare carpets, dirty floors, and lack of baths and lavatories in the Hohenzollerns’ ancestral castles;* about the frequent absences of her soldier husband. Worse, she displayed the insufferable habit of saying that everything was better in England, a habit that became almost compulsive as time went on. This seemed to confirm Prussian suspicions that she intended to bring Prussia under English influence, th
ough it was actually a manifestation of loneliness and homesickness. “She loved England8 and everything English with a fervour which at times roused contradictions in her Prussian surroundings,” one of her few allies, her lady-in-waiting Walpurga Hohenthal, later wrote. “I was perhaps the only one who entirely sympathized … but I was too young and inexperienced to reflect that it would not be wise to give them too much scope.”

  Back in England her parents didn’t understand. The queen tried to micromanage her, sometimes sending her four letters a week and telling her not to get too familiar with her Prussian relatives. Albert limited himself to writing once a week, and was gentler, but in his way just as insistent. He demanded essays on international affairs and told her to study chemistry and geometry—which she duly did. Her in-laws were unsympathetic: Fritz’s father, Wilhelm, was a philistine arch-traditionalist whose deepest emotional attachment was to the army. He required only that his son and daughter-in-law attend every court function and be entirely obedient to his will. Fritz’s mother, Augusta, who loathed her husband and was hugely disliked at court at least partly for being an educated woman with liberal views, was angry and difficult (the King of Belgium called her “the Dragon9 of the Rhine”), and made no attempt to support her daughter-in-law. The Hohenzollerns were a by-word for family dysfunction. The father of Frederick the Great (Wilhelm’s great-great-great-great-uncle) had locked him up and forced him to watch his best friend’s execution. Oedipal conflicts seemed to afflict every generation.

  Within a couple of years of Willy’s birth, Vicky’s “mission” was in shreds. “You cannot think10 how painful it is, to be continuously surrounded by people who consider your very existence a misfortune,” she wrote to her mother. Then, just before Willy’s third birthday in 1861, Albert died and Vicky lost her guide and hero. Later that same year Fritz’s sixty-four-year-old father, Wilhelm, came to the throne for what would be a twenty-seven-year reign. He made it clear he wanted to strengthen relations with Russia, and at his coronation he announced that he ruled by divine right—a concept the English crown had abandoned 300 years before. A year later, in the midst of a battle with the Landtag over military reform, which everyone expected to end with the king giving in to more constitutional curtailments of his powers, he appointed Otto von Bismarck as his minister-president. Bismarck closed down the Landtag. Over the next twenty years, he would turn Germany into the political powerhouse of continental Europe, while also eliminating liberals from power and delivering the organs of government into the hands of conservatives and rural property-owners, the Junkers.

  Vicky hated Bismarck. “That wretch11 Bismarck … has done all he could to irritate the King against London and Lord Palmerston and Lord Russell,” she complained in 1862. “Bismarck is such a wicked man that he does not care how many fibs he tells to serve his own purposes, and this is the man who is to govern this country.” To Bismarck, Vicky and Fritz were a dangerous magnet for liberal sympathies. He set out deliberately to neutralize the couple. He alienated father from son, and used every weapon at his disposal: feeding damaging stories into the Berlin rumour mill and the German press—much of which he secretly funded—to characterize Vicky as a sinister representative of British ambitions in Germany and Fritz as her dupe. Vicky thought she could take Bismarck on. “I enjoy12 a pitched battle,” she wrote optimistically. But she was a rank amateur prone to moments of tremendous misjudgement, and he was perhaps the most brilliant political tactician of the late nineteenth century. As if that weren’t enough, Vicky’s health collapsed: she was plagued for weeks at a time by chronic pains and fevers for which there seemed no cure, symptoms that some historians now think might have been porphyria13—the illness which had caused George III’s madness.

  It wasn’t surprising, perhaps, that Vicky’s family and children became one of her refuges from the hostility of the court, a place where she could express her frustration with her situation, and where she channelled all the disappointed energy. There were eight children in all: Willy, his sister Charlotte and his brother Heinrich, to whom he was closest; then five subsequent siblings: Sigismund, Victoria (known as Moretta), Waldemar, Sophie and Margaret (or Mossy), of whom the two boys died in childhood. The family dynamic seems to have been in the main warm and loving. When Fritz was in one of his depressions, Vicky believed the company of the children dispelled it. She loved her children, especially her eldest. “You do not know14 how dear that child is,” she wrote to her mother when he was a few months old. “… I feel so proud of him and it makes me so happy to carry him about.” But her love was complicated, especially for her first three children, and most of all for Wilhelm. She veered between tenderness and love, and brutal criticism, obsessively high expectations and anxiety over their shortcomings. Albert had instilled in her a belief that character could be created and moulded by education, that perfectibility could be achieved by hard work. “The welfare15 of the world,” he said, depended on “the good education of princes.” He’d also—along with the queen, who was a relentless critic of her children—turned his daughter into an anxious perfectionist compulsively critical of herself, and then of her own children. Vicky was determined that her son would measure up to her father’s standards. She scrutinized every bit of the boy—just as her parents had scrutinized her—frequently found him wanting and let him know it. She wrote to her mother when he was nine, “Still I dote16 on Willy and think there is a great deal in him. He is by no means a common place child; if one can root out or keep down pride, conceitedness, selfishness and laziness … I do not speak as openly of our little ones to anyone but you.” But whatever she said to her mother, she did communicate her dissatisfactions to her children. She would mark the misspellings in Wilhelm’s letters to her and send them back. She was just as bad with his brother Heinrich, describing “his poor ugly17 face,” and reporting that he was “awfully backward”18 and “hopelessly lazy.” The question of perfection (or imperfection) was constantly in the air because, of course, Willy’s stunted arm meant he was very visibly imperfect.

  Within a few months of Willy’s birth it was clear that his arm wasn’t growing properly. He couldn’t lift it and the fingers had curled into a kind of claw. In Prussia, royalty was closely identified with the army and physical prowess. On Willy’s birth, in a gesture of typical Hohenzollern tact, Fritz’s father had wondered to his face whether it was appropriate to congratulate him on the birth of a “defective”19 prince. Vicky worried over it constantly, asking herself whether the nation would tolerate a physically disabled prince. “I cannot tell you20 how it worries me, I am ready to cry whenever I think of it,” she wrote to her father when Willy was six months old and had begun to undergo all kinds of peculiar treatments to mend the arm. It was covered in cold compresses, sprayed with sea water, massaged and given a weekly “animal bath,” in which it was placed inside the warm carcass of a freshly killed hare—an experience, his mother noticed, Willy seemed to like very much. Queen Victoria thought the practice medieval, and it was: the idea was that the heat of the dead animal would transmute itself into the arm of the child. At least this was harmless. Less so was the binding of his right arm to his body, when Willy reached toddler-hood, in an attempt to force the other arm to function. It left him with nothing to balance with as he tried to learn to walk. Even nastier were the electric shocks passed regularly through his arm from the age of fourteen months. “He gets so21 fretful and cross and violent and passionate that it makes me quite nervous sometimes,” Vicky wrote. By the age of four, Willy had developed torticollis—the right side of his neck had contracted, lifting the shoulder and making him look crooked. (One biographer has suggested that this came about through a desire to turn away from his affliction.) To try to correct this, he was strapped into a body-length machine to stretch the muscles of his right side. Vicky wrote painful, guilty letters to Queen Victoria describing and drawing the contraption, which looked like a medieval instrument of torture. “He has been22 a constant source of anxiety ever since h
e has been in the world. I cannot tell you what I suffered when I saw him in that machine the day before yesterday—it was all I could do to prevent myself from crying. To see one’s child treated like one deformed—it is really very hard …”

  In the end two small operations severed the tendons that were distorting his body and corrected the torticollis. The arm never improved, though there was always another “specialist” with another crank “cure.” The electric shocks and stretching machines continued until Willy was ten, when the doctors noted how “nervously tense”23 the treatments made him. Wilhelm later claimed they caused “intolerable pain.”24 The only thing that made any difference was a course of gymnastics which developed a compensatory great strength in Willy’s right arm.