Anglomania

by Ian Buruma

  When the two countries, largely through the kaiser’s own fault, did grow further and further apart and threatened to destroy not only each other, but the whole of Europe, the kaiser’s reaction was rather like Hitler’s would be some decades later: a form of ethnic pique. He couldn’t understand why one member of the great Teutonic Race should fight another. He could only ascribe it to “typically English” envy of Germany’s success, or to shabby commercial opportunism. When the German ambassador in London reported in 1912 that the British would fight on the side of the French if Germany should attack France, the kaiser flew into a rage. How was it possible, he wrote furiously in the margins of his ambassador’s dispatch, that in the “final struggle between the Slavs and the Teutons,” the “Anglo-Saxons will be on the side of the Slavs and the Gauls?”

  The British policy of balancing Continental European powers was, in the kaiser’s view, not only “idiocy”; it was typical of a nation of traders to wish to prevent warrior nations from taking up swords to defend their honor. The British were a bunch of contemptible shopkeepers, who understood only the language of money. Race and honor meant nothing to them. The blandishments of the marketplace had sapped their warrior spirit. Worse: the merchants of Britain were content to see the Continental powers tear one another apart. They got others to fight their wars for them, just like the Jews. And like the Jews, they masked their evil intentions behind humanistic ideals. They encouraged revolution in Russia and would have the liberalized Russians and the liberal French gang up on Germany. The explanation for this disgusting behavior was plain: the Jews had taken over Albion. Once the Jewish cosmopolitan element was purged from that once great nation, Britain would return to its natural Continental ally, and the two halves of Wilhelm could finally come together.

  THE KAISER’S PERSONAL history would have been fascinating, but of minor importance, if he had wielded less power and his own preoccupations hadn’t happened to coincide in an unfortunate way with the history of Germany itself. By the 1880s German industry had begun to catch up and in some cases overtake Britain’s. The British Empire, though still the greatest power in the world, was showing signs of wear. Crises in Khartoum and Afghanistan were watched from Berlin with a degree of schadenfreude. It is unfashionable and certainly risky to ascribe human characteristics to nations, but Wilhelminian Germany had all the marks of adolescence: full of bravado and sensitive to slights; eager to show off brute strength and confused about identity. To be German was as much a question of language, culture, and race as it was to be a citizen of the German Reich. The borders of Deutschtum were dangerously fuzzy. Wilhelm’s Reich was young and impatient, but at its core was old Prussia, which viewed modern developments with dismay.

  So much about the Wilhelminian period had an unpleasant swagger, an ostentatiousness, a crying for attention about it: all those helmeted figures on outsize, neo-rococo facades, the endless parades and flashy uniforms. Kaiser Wilhelm II did not create the nation in his own image. That would have been impossible. But his posturing, although embarrassing to many Germans, was typical of the Reich he ruled. He wanted to get away from his mother’s haughty English skirts (as did his uncle Edward, in his way), and the kaiser’s Germany measured itself with increasing resentment against his grandmother’s empire. England was resented by the kaiser and his reactionary allies, not only for being older, grander and more powerful, but for being the source of liberalism, which threatened to consume the old Prussian order.

  Although the kaiser was a ferocious enemy of liberalism, the start of his reign was relatively moderate. His first chancellor, General Leo von Caprivi, was a cultivated, liberal-minded man who increased the welfare of workers, promoted foreign trade, lowered tariffs on imported goods, warned against the dangers of anti-Semitism, and sought good relations with Britain. However, this moderate interlude lasted only four years. When the kaiser turned against the usual enemies of his Reich—Jews, liberals, socialists, Social Democrats, or indeed democrats of any kind—Caprivi was swiftly dismissed. The kaiser’s enemies still dominated the Reichstag and parts of the metropolitan press. But the tragedy for Germany, and Europe, was that Bismarck had emasculated the Reichstag: parliamentarians could criticize, but not govern. That task fell to the kaiser and his clique of generals and courtiers. Like the liberal press, which continued to function in its irreverent, satirical way, parliament’s largely negative role only fed the kaiser’s paranoia about liberal-socialist-Jewish conspiracies to undermine his Reich.

  The kaiser didn’t need to look far to find fellow paranoiacs. Industrial progress was making Germany, or at least many Germans, richer than they had ever been, but landed Junkers saw it erode their privileges: rich stockbrokers were moving into the villas some of the gentry could no longer afford; down-at-the-heel aristocrats were marrying the stockbrokers’ daughters. Theodor Fontane described these little aristocratic “tragedies” in some of his best novels. He found, only somewhat to his amusement, that his most loyal readers were Jews. A similar process was taking place in other European countries. There were anxious aristocrats in England who didn’t like to see bourgeois upstarts buying their way into the British political establishment, accumulating titles and land. As in Germany and France, many of them saw the rich Jew as the main destroyer of the old order. On the whole, however, the British upper class was flexible enough to absorb new wealth and cash in on capitalist opportunity. But in the anxious eyes of German nobles rich Jews and rich Britishers blurred to form a liberal demon. The kaiser was influenced by a variety of characters who echoed these resentments.

  First, there was the court chaplain, a disreputable political operator named Adolf Stoecker. He argued that Jewish stock-market wealth was the result of “Manchester liberalism” and that a Jewish-liberal alliance had impoverished the German workers. Traveling around Germany, making raucous speeches in this vein, Stoecker hoped to steer workers away from Social Democrats and attract them to his Christian Social party. Kaiser Wilhelm I, though not unsympathetic to Stoecker’s views, didn’t like to see his chaplain gadding about as a political agitator. Bismarck, who thought anti-Semitism was vulgar, couldn’t stand the man, especially when his personal banker, Bleichröder, came under attack. But Wilhelm II, as crown prince, thought Stoecker “had something of Luther about him.”

  Stoecker was still hovering around the imperial court when the future kaiser met his most intimate friend, Philipp Eulenburg, at a hunting party in 1886. “Phili” (sometimes “Philine”) Eulenburg was a clever, highly educated man with an artistic temperament, but also a bit of a crank. He was not much of a sportsman, and although always present at the kaiser’s dressing-up parties, he rarely participated in the more physical entertainments. Dressing up as a sausage, producing animal noises, or dancing in a skirt were not for him. Instead, he would play the piano and sing Nordic ballads of his own composition in a fine baritone voice, while his royal friend, addressed as Liebchen, “darling,” turned the pages. Philine’s circle of friends, which gathered at his Liebenberg estate, included, along with the kaiser, Kuno von Moltke and Axel “Dachs” von Varnbüler. The set was known as the Liebenberg Round Table.

  Phili’s crankiness had its harmless side. He had a taste for spiritism. In one instance he visited a clairvoyant together with Kuno Moltke, who reported to Varnbüler that Philine felt “absolutely dreadful—in spite of the clairvoyante who felt him in the rectum and gave him such helpful guidelines for his behaviour.” But despite such curious fancies, Eulenburg was a shrewd diplomat who was at times a stabilizing influence on the kaiser. And yet it was also he who contrived to get rid of Caprivi. And Eulenburg’s crankiness had a more sinister side, which encouraged the kaiser’s worst instincts. Not only was Eulenburg an Anglophobe—that was to be expected—but he was a firm believer in the Führerprinzip, as long as the absolute leader was of royal blood. The matter of blood was indeed paramount in his thinking. One of Phili Eulenburg’s closest friends was the Frenchman Count Gobineau, author of Essay on the Inequ
ality of the Human Races.

  The exact nature of Eulenburg’s relations with Gobineau and the kaiser himself is still a matter of some dispute. More may well have been going on at Liebenberg, and on the imperial yachts, than dressing up in tutus. We know that Eulenburg thought his correspondence with the French racialist thinker was “too much of an intimate personal nature” to be made public. And we also know that Eulenburg’s royal connections came to a sudden end when that scourge of the kaiser’s circle, Maximilian Harden, published reports of Eulenburg’s homosexual activities. A court case was prepared against him. Damaging witnesses, in the form of two Bavarian workingmen who had enjoyed Eulenburg’s favors, turned up. Phili’s old friends dropped him. The kaiser, who dropped him too, blamed the whole affair on “Jewish impudence, slander and lies.” And the only thing that saved Eulenburg from complete disaster was his physical unfitness to appear in court.

  It was through Eulenburg that the kaiser met the man who promised to reconcile the two nations in the imperial bloodstream. And the resulting brew was sheer poison. The key figure in this meeting, quite unwittingly, because he was already dead, was Richard Wagner. Many years before his scandal, Eulenburg introduced the kaiser to the Wagner family in Bayreuth. Eulenburg was a Wagnerian of the first order. The kaiser loved Wagner’s music as much as his mother loathed it—a good enough reason, in fact, for the kaiser to love it. He had his car fitted with a horn that sounded the lightning motif of Das Rheingold. So, one fine day in 1891, at Eulenburg’s hunting lodge, Wilhelm met that great Wagnerian fanatic Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the most noxious of the kaiser’s mentors. Chamberlain was married to Wagner’s daughter Eva and lived in Bayreuth. He was the perfect match for the kaiser: an English fetishist of German blood.

  Like Eulenburg, Chamberlain was singularly lacking in machismo. He was neither a soldier nor a sportsman, but a bookish worshiper of culture, specifically German culture: Wagner, Beethoven, Goethe … Shakespeare. Perhaps the kaiser was bored with the limited conversation of soldiers and enjoyed an artistic ambience, especially when it took on a spiritual, Nordic tone. He had some Jewish friends, too, such as Albert Ballin, chairman of the Hamburg-American Steamship Line, but the kaiser denied that his friend was a Jew or, as he put it, “a real Jew.” German music, German language, German Geist, German race—these were Chamberlain’s main preoccupations. And it was, in his view, only through these manifestations of the German spirit that the world would be saved from the abyss of deracinated Yankee-Anglo-Jewish materialism.

  Chamberlain had come to this conclusion relatively late in life. He was born in Portsmouth and was proud of being from a “purely British family,” with nothing but English, Scottish, and Gaelic blood. Much of his early education was in France, and as a boy he spoke better French than English. Chamberlain was already thirty when he realized the full extent of British and French degeneracy and discovered the heroic beauty of Wagner’s music and the German language. His first books were about Wagner. His political or, rather, anti-political philosophy remained resolutely Wagnerian.

  For the kaiser, the idea of an Englishman coming to Germany to worship the German spirit was like a dream come true. Although undeniably British, Chamberlain believed in the greatness of the German Volk. He was a British “Aryan” who hated the liberal “lies” that drove Wilhelm apart from his mother. The kaiser asked Chamberlain, in 1902, to please “save our German Volk, our Germanentum, for God has sent you as our helper!” An extraordinary correspondence followed, which continued, on and off, until the kaiser died. The kaiser sent short, admiring notes. Chamberlain sent long, effusive tracts, in which he developed his Anglophobic, anti-Semitic, Germanophile ideas to the point of murderous lunacy.

  Chamberlain’s Anglophobia came both from the Left and the Right, a mixture of extremes that might be described, anachronistically, as National Socialism. He wouldn’t have been an Englishman if class consciousness hadn’t come into it. In a strange and certainly treacherous pamphlet entitled England and Germany, published at the height of World War I, Chamberlain works himself up into a foaming rage against the English class system. “The prattle,” he writes, “about political freedom in England has been enough to irritate me, as long as I can remember.” After all, “the entire legislation of Britain—the Constitution, the government and its policy—are the work of a single, social class, without any true participation of the remaining population.”

  This criticism of British politics goes back to Marat and his fellow French revolutionaries. It is exaggerated, but not entirely spurious. It is hard to disagree with Chamberlain’s view that the lack of a national education system is to blame for British class divisions. There is indeed much to be admired about the German school system. But Chamberlain’s characteristically racial explanation for British upper-class rule is harder to follow, although less than wholly original. He blames it on what he calls “the event”: the Norman victory at Hastings in 1066, when haughty conquerors of alien blood destroyed “Anglo-Saxon civilization.” The aloofness of the Norman nobles from the “unmixed Saxon population” led to an “upper caste.”

  This, however, was not the only catastrophe to wreck merry England. Pristine, rural, “unmixed,” agricultural England was transformed in the sixteenth century into a nation of bellicose traders and pirates. The sons of earls and dukes, Chamberlain writes in a familiar lament, “disappear from society to make money,” and consequently their “moral compass” is warped and corrupted. Chamberlain had a Wagnerian nostalgia for a tribal Utopia, a community unsullied by the lust for gold. “We were merry, we are merry no longer. The complete decline of country life and the equally complete victory of God Mammon, the deity of Industry and Trade, have caused the true, harmless, refreshing merriness to betake itself out of England.” This culminated in the modern age, when England had become hopelessly deracinated, as well as very unmerry.

  As in the decadent days of Rome, Chamberlain observes to the kaiser in 1903, “the civis britannicus is now become a purely political concept.” Even in France, with its detestable republican notions of citizenship, it was getting harder for a foreigner to become French. But in Britain, why, “every Basuto nigger” could get a passport by paying two shillings and sixpence. In fifty years, Chamberlain predicts, “the English aristocracy will be nothing but a money oligarchy, without a shred of racial solidarity or relation to the throne …”

  Fourteen years later, in the middle of the Great War, Chamberlain writes to the kaiser once more, from his house in Bayreuth. This time, the situation is even worse: “England has fallen utterly into the hands of Jews and Americans.” The war must be seen as a Jewish grab for world domination. Germany stands for priceless art, Christianity, spiritual education, and moral force; the Jewish world is a soulless one of finance, factories, trade, and an unlimited plutocracy. This, then, is “Juda-England,” which the Kaiser railed against during his exile in Doorn. This image, which was not new, but put across with great conviction, was presented to the kaiser by an Englishman. And that same Englishman had given him the cure: “Nothing in the world can save us all, but a strong, a victorious and a wise Germany.”

  Beware the men who would save us! The kaiser wanted to save England, his motherland, which never gave him sufficient respect. There were times when he saw himself as the only German friend of England. In a rambling discourse, published in The Daily Telegraph in 1908, he whined that the British were wrong to distrust him. After all, even as his German subjects had turned against British imperialism, he alone had supported the British in the Boer War; more than that, he had provided the British with a strategy that allowed Lord Roberts to defeat the Boers. His statements aroused contempt in Britain and outrage in Germany. At that moment, he really did stand alone.

  The problem was that England did not want to be saved, least of all by the German kaiser. And the would-be savior’s response was like that of a child: if the world would not bend to his will, he would wreck it. Even as he sent gratuitous advice to his gra
ndmother, whom he sometimes referred to as “the queen of Hindustan,” as to how she should shore up her empire, his favorite motto, expressed in letters to the Russian tsar, was a version of Cato’s dictum: “Apart from anything else, I propose that Britain must be destroyed” (“Ceterum censeo Britanniam esse delendam”).

  It was not to be. And that is why the kaiser ended up chopping trees, drinking English tea, and keeping up imperial pretenses at a country house in Holland. Yet the dream of saving England, expressed in that picture he drew for his cousin, the tsar, in 1895, of brave Prussia saving maidenly Britannia from peril, never entirely faded. This could be achieved only by first destroying Britain’s cosmopolitanism and its effete lords and ladies, its Freemasons, liberals, merchants, bankers—in short, by purging Juda from England.

  On Christmas Day 1940, he could look upon the world with satisfaction. Germans were victorious all over the European continent. The blitzkrieg had been a resounding success and the kaiser rejoiced that “the Last Judgement on Juda-England” had begun. When he died at 11:30 A.M. on June 4, 1941, Nazi Germany was at the pinnacle of its power. Less than a year before his death, he wrote to a childhood friend: “The brilliant leading Generals in this war come from My school, they fought under My command in the world war as lieutenants, captains or young majors.” These proud words were written in English.

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  LESLIE HOWARD

  IN THE FINAL SCENE OF THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL, MADE IN 1934, Lord Blakeney, played with English gentlemanly panache by Leslie Howard, returns from France. He has just saved dozens of French aristocrats from Robespierre’s Terror by smuggling them to England, the Island of Liberty. On the boat, gazing at the cliffs of Dover as though witness to a revelation, Leslie Howard speaks the last words of the film to his French wife, played by Merle Oberon: “Look, Marguerite …,” he says. Then a pregnant pause, and then, with deep emotion: “England!”