In Europe

by Geert Mak

  ‘Did I notice the change? I had an absolutely wonderful childhood at Potsdam, I went to school there, and after that I joined the army, the cavalry, because I was crazy about horses. That was in December 1939. The war had already begun.

  ‘My oldest brother Oscar was killed almost immediately. Shortly afterwards my cousin Wilhelm, the crown prince's eldest son, died as well. They organised a huge funeral for him at Potsdam, thousands of people attended. After that all of the kaiser's descendants were brought back from the front, including me. The Nazis did not want another demonstration of imperial loyalty like that. In 1943 we were all actually discharged from military service. The grounds given were: unsuited, due to international family ties. After the war I wanted to attend university, but the British were having none of it. Once again, it was those ‘international family ties’.

  ‘In the long run, through a friend, I found a position at a plant for colourings and flavourings, and together we were able to build that company into an international firm with twenty-two subsidiaries. Later on I'll be picking up my grandchildren at the station in Göttingen. No, I'm doing quite well, thank you.

  ‘The last German emperor, in other words, was my grandfather. From the time I was very young we always spent a week or two each summer at Doorn. He was a true grandfather. He had the special gift of being able to make every grandchild feel that he or she was his favourite. Our life at home was quite spartan, so we hugely enjoyed all that lovely Dutch food he served us. He was the one who introduced us to art and literature. He was interested in everything. As children, we were amazed by that.

  ‘I knew him, in other words, as a very different man from the one you read about in the history books. He probably mellowed as he grew older as well; in any case I never heard him speak an unfriendly word to anyone.

  ‘At first, living at Doorn was extremely difficult for him. The Dutch sheltered and protected him quite chivalrously, but he had fallen from the highest heights to the lowest depths, psychologically as well. Sometime you should read what was written about him at his silver jubilee, and then what they all said about him after the war. When a system of government as huge as that collapses, with everything and everyone in it who bore any responsibility, then the first reaction is to put the blame on the person who was at the top. In this case, that was my grandfather.

  ‘Back then there was also all that pomp and circumstance. They held that against him too. Every period, of course, has its own style – those long-winded communist diatribes from the days of the DDR wouldn't be tolerated any more either – so a lot of it had to do with the spirit of the times. At the same time, my grandfather was truly a man of broad interests. Technical things, scientific discoveries, educational reform, theatre, art, he was engrossed by all of that. Perhaps his interests were a bit too broad. Altogether, in my view, that gave him a certain ambivalence. He saw himself as an heir to the old Prussian rulers, but in actual fact he was much more a representative of the modern Germany, and naturally that created a certain tension.

  ‘The way I see it, the course of events leading up to the First World War had something fateful to it. No single European at that time could have imagined that out of all those little German states, a modern super-power would emerge so quickly. That wasn't particularly pleasant for all the surrounding countries, especially when that new Germany began behaving like the nouveau riche. You're right, if Germany had shown a little more caution, it would all have turned out differently.

  ‘I still feel quite a strong bond with my grandfather. These days I see many things differently, but I always try to place his actions in the context of the day in which he lived. You see, the German Empire created in 1871 still had to reach maturity, it still had to adopt a whole new form. Before that, Germany was a quilt of smaller and larger princedoms, and in fact they were not at all keen about becoming united. Furthermore, there was a deep, deep chasm between Protestants and Catholics, and you had the extremely repressive Socialist Act as well, with all the struggle associated with that. Still, that empire survived the First World War, the victors allowed it to go on existing, it survived the Second World War, and today that unity is recognised by virtually all Germans.

  ‘The whole process took place in the space of only two or three generations, during the lifetimes of my grandfather, my father and I. So yes, I feel a part of it, just as I feel an affinity with those who live in what was once the DDR. I often think my generation, the generation which lived through and survived the Third Reich, we are probably the ones who understand best what the people in the DDR went through. We understand how a simple individual has to keep himself going under an authoritarian regime like that. I can understand them much better than my children's generation. They've never known anything but freedom.

  ‘Once again, you can't judge people outside the context of the age in which they live. Someone in my mother's family, for example, was deeply involved in the plot against Hitler on 20 July, 1944. He was arrested and hanged. But still, in the late 1920s that same man had been such a wild-eyed Nazi that my father refused to allow him to enter our home. We found out much too late that he had changed from a fanatical supporter to a vehement opponent. And I myself, if I hadn't had my background at home, I wonder whether I would not have become a Nazi too, in 1933, during the so-called ‘national rebirth’. All I can do is hope that, like that distant cousin of mine, I would have had the courage later to turn actively against that regime. But there weren't many like him.

  ‘Within our family, there was much disagreement about the Nazis. I can still remember one Christmas Eve when we children were sent out of the room because my uncles – who were all rather temperamental – had started a very loud argument about one of them having joined the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, the NSDAP.

  ‘My father and my uncle, Eitel Fritz, the second son, who never had children, were absolutely anti-Nazi. The crown prince, my uncle Wilhelm, believed at first that the Nazis could perhaps help him to retrieve the crown, which was utter nonsense. Later on he became a fell opponent as well.

  ‘My uncle August, though, he was a real Nazi. He even became Gruppenführer in the stormtroopers, the SA. Strangely enough, he was the kind of man from whom you would never expect something like that. A real aesthete, most of his friends were Jewish artists. But he, of all people, climbed onto the bandwagon and never had the courage to hop off again. Whether he was that staunch in the war, I'm not sure. But it doesn't matter. In those days a great many simple people danced to his pipes and trusted him: oh, one of the kaiser's sons is a member as well. That is what you can blame him for most. A person in his position must be able to think ahead, more than most. But of course that's easy to say now.

  ‘My grandfather was very critical of the Nazis. One evening after dinner in 1934, I remember him reading a newspaper report to us about the murder of Dolfuss, and how upset he was by that. The gangster mentality it showed, just like the killings of SA leader Röhm and his men, he despised that.

  ‘Yes, of course, on the other hand there was that congratulatory telegram he sent to Hitler on 17 June, 1940, for his victory over France. “What a turn of events, led by the hand of God!” I've always wondered whether my grandfather wrote that himself, or whether it was his private advisor, General Dommes. He knew there were all kinds of problems between the kaiser and the Nazis. Perhaps he hoped in that way to improve relations with Berlin.

  ‘But let me be frank: my grandfather was certainly enthusiastic about the successes of the Wehrmacht, in which he knew a great many people. In his own eyes he always remained a bit of an army man. There was also a certain amount of national pride, a feeling many Germans had at the time, even if they were not at all fond of National Socialism.

  ‘But that feeling passed soon enough. Just after I returned from the French campaign, in summer 1940, I spent a weekend with him at Doorn. He ranted against Hitler, against his strategy. The struggle for England was more or less over by that time, Churchill had refused
all ceasefire proposals, and there were signs that Hitler was going to move against Russia. My grandfather saw the catastrophe coming: Germany would inevitably be caught waging a war on two fronts. That was the last time I saw him.

  ‘These days, our family only gets together for funerals and on special occasions. My second cousins, the daughters of Crown Prince Wilhelm's son, Louis Ferdinand, organise a concert at Schloss Hohenzollern once a year, and we see each other then. My grandfather's body is kept in a mausoleum at Doorn, in a coffin on trestles, so that he can be repatriated right away if Germany should request that. But I believe Doorn is an excellent final resting place for him. He felt quite content there in later years, and to send him to Berlin and have him shoved in among those hundred and fifty other sarcophagi, in that terrible family tomb …

  ‘My father moved to an estate near Göttingen after the war. My uncle August spent some time in a prisoner-of-war camp, and died soon after he was released. My other uncle, the crown prince, was taken prisoner by the French. Later he was sent back to the castle at Hohenzollern. But he was already a broken man. He had no more illusions that Germany would some day embrace the monarchy again. Louis Ferdinand still toyed with that idea, but he was the only one. Sometimes he would say: “If called, I am ready.”

  ‘But then, who would ever call him?’

  Chapter TWELVE

  Stockholm

  SUNDAY, 28 FEBRUARY. I LEAVE BERLIN AT 10.30, AND AT 2.30 I see the Baltic, at the end of a long, bare field of stubble running down to the shoreline. Not much of anything happens during this trip. At first we roll along in the sunshine for a bit, then the sky goes grey. The landscape spreads out flat as a tabletop. Spring is nowhere in sight, many of the fields are covered in water. We stop at an old-fashioned, staunch-looking station painted yellow, with decorative female breasts moulded beneath the eaves – Wittenberge – and then I fall asleep.

  In the old days, during a trip like this, the saltwater would have been flying in all directions. At Puttgarden they slid the carriages one by one, puffing and steaming, onto the ferry to Rødbyhavn and fastened them down with chains, the ship's horn would scream, smoke would come pouring from the stacks and there it would go, creaking and swaying. These days the train rolls into a floating amusement park full of shops and cafés, with lots of chrome and marble, a magic kingdom in which everything happens automatically, right down to the sliding doors and flushing toilets.

  After that there is the rolling countryside of Scandinavia, white houses, cows around a pond, a blonde girl on a bike at a crossing. In the late afternoon we roll across little inland seas and huge bridges. The sky clears, a very faint blue, a big white moon is suspended on the horizon, floating above the water. Then the world slowly empties out.

  My route is following a strange detour now. I am trying to travel in the tracks of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Bolshevik leader and professional revolutionary, who returned in April 1917 from the dissident den of Zurich – by way of Germany, Sweden and Finland – to Petrograd, as St Petersburg was known then.

  Russia at the time was in an uproar. Striking workers marched across Petrograd's Nevski Prospect, entire army units mutinied, Czar Nicholas II had stepped down, soldiers’ and workers’ soviets had seized power and a provisional government had been set up, the February Revolution was over. This was the moment for which Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, had been waiting the past thirty years, the culmination of a life full of theories, intrigues, exile, study and even more theories: the moment a young Pole burst into his sparsely furnished room at Spiegelgasse 14 or 15 March, 1917, and cried out ‘Russia is in revolt!’ That afternoon all of the city's Russian expatriates rushed the news-stands along Zurich's lake shore and gaped at a little article, squeezed between the reports run over from the front onto page two of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung: one week earlier, it said, on 23 February by the Russian calendar, the revolution had broken out in the Russian capital. The Duma had ordered the arrest of the czar's ministers. Nothing more was known.

  Were these revolutionaries-at-arm's-length surprised by this turn of events? That would be putting it mildly. Lenin, as his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya later wrote, was shocked and silenced, ‘stunned’. As the leader of the Bolsheviks he should, of course, have been informed of what was going on, but he was not. The Mensheviks, his opponents within the revolutionary movement, had taken things into their own hands. He must have been at his wit's end: he had missed the crucial moment around which his whole live had revolved. Now he saw that the long-awaited revolution could take place without him, the leader of the rigidly organised Bolsheviks, knowing a thing about it.

  To many Russians, Vladimir Ulyanov was a living symbol. For seventeen years his life had consisted of poverty and exile, persecution by czarist agents, conflicts with the Mensheviks and his own comrades, and all of it at a far remove from the Russian proletariat: that, of course, never stopped him from developing one theory after another about them. His isolation increased even further after the outbreak of the First World War. In 1914, only twenty-six of the members on the roll of Lenin's secret political cell were not living in exile; by 1916, only ten of those were still active. The movement's already slender funding dried up. By early 1917, the Ulyanovs were having a hard time paying the rent for the house on the Spiegelgasse. In his desperation, Lenin quarrelled with almost all of his supporters: the brilliant Nikolai Bukarin, ‘that pig Trotsky’, the gifted German theoretician Rosa Luxemburg, and the charming Polish ‘con man’ Karl Radek.

  Politically, too, he was at the end of his tether. The Swiss police were much more interested in the Cabaret Voltaire, opposite his house, where a group of artists had been giving unintelligible performances since 1916, reading manifestos, shrieking, sobbing, whistling and pounding out rhythms on the tables. That, too, was a form of protest: these poets and painters felt that it was futile to search for truth in bourgeois society, that the world was one big lie, and that only after casting off the ballast of the old culture could they arrive at anything new. Their movement was called Dada, and the impact they had on twentieth-century art was, in retrospect, almost as great as Lenin's on international politics.

  As far as we know, no revolutionary communion was held between the neighbours. Lenin's biographers describe the group of Russian exiles as an unhappy, frustrated, homesick circle. ‘The world in which they lived was small, incestuous in character, marked by fierce conflicts between opposing factions and rigid loyalties within them,’ writes Michael Pearson. ‘Outside these narrow limits of cafés and revolutionary journals, Lenin was virtually unknown.’

  Eight months later, this same man would gain control over an empire of more than 150 million souls. But on 15 March, 1917, Lenin's most serious problem was how to cover the distance between Zurich and Russia, as well as between his theoretical revolution and actual events.

  How was he to go about it? Lenin's first plan was to travel in the guise of a deaf-mute Swede, in order to move as quickly as possible through Germany and Scandinavia to Petrograd. After that he hit upon the idea of chartering a plane, until his comrades convinced him that airplanes and war made for an exceptionally risky combination. Finally, someone came up with the idea of asking the German government for a temporary transit visa.

  Contact was established via the German consul in Bern, and Berlin agreed at once. The authorities were even willing, if necessary, to smuggle the revolutionaries through the front lines into Russia. This generosity was not wholly altruistic. As from 1914, ultra-conservative Germany had developed an intense interest in all revolutionaries who could make life difficult for their enemies. And the imperial intelligence service was well equipped to do so: it was already maintaining a measure of regular contact with almost all of the movements that would later play a role in Europe. For a long time, therefore, Germany had been familiar with Lenin's group of Bolsheviks. The Germans were anxious to put a speedy end to the war in the East – the more so after American troops began arriving on the Western Front – and so wer
e willing to export these revolutionary bacilli to the Russian enemy as swiftly as possible.

  For Lenin, the Germans’ eagerness constituted a major political risk; his trip could now be seen as ‘consorting with the enemy’. Especially since Lenin did not bother to wait for permission from the provisional government. It was his idea to have the train granted the same kind of extra-territorial status as a foreign embassy, a kind of political vacuum in which he could travel through Germany without, at least officially, being infected by the German foe. This request, too, was honoured by the German government.

  And so it was that on 9 April, 1917, the Ulyanovs left the Zähringerhof hotel in Zurich to go home.

  Many of their fellow travellers later wrote accounts of the trip in the ‘sealed train’, and their stories provide an interesting look at the clique that was soon to turn Europe upside down. There were more than thirty Russian exiles on board, as well as a child, the four-year-old Robert. During the farewell lunch, Lenin gave a speech, a pastoral letter ‘to the Swiss workers’ in which he stressed that the socialist revolution would be a long-term affair, particularly in backward Russia. Ulyanov and Nadezhda were the only ones who had a second-class compartment to themselves. The two German officers escorting the exiles remained at the back of the carriage, behind a line drawn in chalk on the floor to demarcate the ‘Russian’ and ‘German’ sections.

  As soon as the train pulled out of Gottmadingen station on the German border, the atmosphere grew livelier. The compartments were filled with talk and laughter. A few of the Russians in the third-class carriage began singing the ‘Marseillaise’. Robert's ‘happy voice could be heard all over the train’, Nadezhda wrote later. The little boy was particularly fond of Grigori Sokolnikov, and kept climbing onto his lap.