Arnon Grunberg

Alive

Nephew

On family passions, the Kaiser and a World War – Christopher Clark in LRB (2009):

“On 30 July 1914, it suddenly dawned on Kaiser Wilhelm II that Germany was on the threshold of a war with three great powers. Panicking, he grabbed a recently arrived dispatch from St Petersburg and committed his agonised thoughts to paper in a frenzy of marginal scribbles. England was the author of Germany’s predicament, he scrawled. Over the years, it had gradually tightened a net of alliances around the unsuspecting Germans. Now, in its perfidy, it claimed to find in Germany’s loyalty to Austria-Hungary the pretext for a war of annihilation. As if all this were not painful enough, the malign intelligence behind the plot had been the kaiser’s uncle, King Edward VII, who had died in 1910: This, in a nutshell, is the true, naked situation engineered so slowly and surely by Edward VII, elaborated and systematically expanded through covert talks with Paris and St Petersburg, and at last brought to completion and put into action by George V . . . A remarkable achievement, that commands the admiration even of him who will be laid low by it! Even after his death, Edward VII is still stronger than I, who am alive! Wilhelm’s vision of Edward VII posthumously launching a world war to humiliate and destroy his nephew was obviously somewhat wide of the mark. But his outburst is a reminder of the dynastic connections and family passions that were such a distinctive feature of European high politics during the last decades before the First World War.

By the turn of the 20th century, the genealogical web of Europe’s reigning families had thickened almost to the point of fusion. Wilhelm II and George V were both grandsons of Queen Victoria. Tsar Nicholas II’s wife, Alexandra of Hesse-Darmstadt, was Victoria’s granddaughter. The mothers of George V and Nicholas II were sisters from the house of Denmark. Wilhelm and Nicholas II were both great-great-grandsons of Tsar Paul I. The kaiser’s great-great-aunt, Charlotte of Prussia, was the tsar’s grandmother. Viewed from this perspective, the outbreak of war in 1914 looks rather like the culmination of a family feud.”

(…)

“Little was done to prepare the future rulers for the challenges of life on the throne. Grigory Danilovich, the hopelessly mediocre ‘military governor’ who took charge of Nicky’s education when the boy turned ten, is said to have told the tsarevich that he would learn all he needed to know from the ‘mysterious forces’ released by the ‘sacrament of taking the oath on the day of the coronation’. After 12 years under the tutelage of John Neale Dalton, a 32-year-old curate with an ‘impressively booming voice’, George was still ‘deficient in even the most elementary subjects’, including spelling and grammar. Georg Ernst Hinzpeter, the man selected to oversee the education of the adolescent Wilhelm, was a far more impressive figure in intellectual terms, but his pedagogical regime, which aimed to break down the ‘crystal-hard egoism’ of the prince by relentlessly exposing him to his own inadequacies, may well have done more harm than good. As one of Nicky’s Russian cousins later put it, ‘the education that was given us atrophied our powers and limited our horizons.’ It would be unfair to blame the teachers alone. The parents, with the exception of Willy’s parents, Vicky and Friedrich, cared little for the accoutrements of a ‘bourgeois’ education, and none of the three boys was an especially talented or co-operative student.”

(…)

“Even George, whose constitutional status protected him from the burdens of executive responsibility, found the public duties of monarchy excruciating. When he read his speeches to open Parliament, his hands would shake so hard that the text had to be set in large type. Max Beerbohm reported feeling a stab of pity for ‘the little king, with the great diamonded crown that covered his eyebrows, and with the eyes that showed so tragically much of effort, of the will to please . . . such a piteous, good, feeble, heroic little figure’. The ministers who came to know him in later years were withering in their appraisals of the royal intellect: ‘The king talked more stupidly about the navy than I have ever heard him before,’ Churchill wrote in 1912. ‘Really it is disheartening to hear this cheap and silly drivel with which he lets himself be filled up.’ Nicky, who was expected to rule as well as reign, knew next to nothing of the workings of the tsarist system and was incapable of regular work. When, in the early 1890s, he began to receive state papers and attend government meetings, he was overwhelmed. ‘I am simply unable to understand how one can possibly read this mass of papers in one week,’ he wrote in 1891. To reduce the burden, he restricted himself to reading ‘one or two more interesting files while others go directly into the fire’. He had scarcely any understanding of economics, and no idea of what ordinary people paid for everyday commodities.”

(…)

“How much difference did the dense nexus of bloodlines make? Did dynastic relationships shape the course of European history on the road to 1914, or were the monarchs (to paraphrase Fernand Braudel) mere crests of foam that the tides of international history carry on their strong backs? The book is less successful in its attempt to integrate the story of the clan with the grand narrative of European politics. The sheer scale and complexity of the task is the main problem. Monarchs played an important role in the stage-management of international relations in late 19th and early 20th-century Europe, and politics was often on the agenda at royal family get-togethers. From this one might be tempted to infer a close causal linkage. But in order to understand the place of the monarchs in the larger scheme of things, we need to establish how much traction they possessed within their respective executives, a matter of lively debate within the relevant specialist literatures. The extent of the kaiser’s power, for example, is still disputed. According to John Röhl, a biographer of Wilhelm II, the kaiser was an ‘invincible monarch’ who ‘personally directed German domestic, external and armaments policy’. For Hans Ulrich Wehler, by contrast, he was a ‘shadow emperor’, ‘one actor among many’, a man who operated at the margins of the political process. There were policies on which the kaiser undeniably did exercise a direct and personal influence, such as the decision to build ships in sufficient numbers to challenge the British, but there were also decisions of world-historical importance, such as the non-renewal of the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia in 1890 or the decision to give the Austrians free rein in Serbia during the last days of July 1914, in which the kaiser was sidelined by his ministers.”

(…)

“Germany’s most important partner, conversely, was Austria-Hungary, whose Habsburg monarch stood at some remove from the Coburg-Hesse-Romanov cousinage. Much has been written on Willy’s tormented relationship with his domineering, obsessive and emphatically English mother, and it is reasonable to suppose that this may help to explain the confusion of dewy-eyed admiration and red-cheeked rage he displayed in his attitude to England. But even a kaiser with no English relations at all would surely have hit on the idea that Germany, like all the other great imperial powers, needed a formidable fleet. And England was not by any means the only subject to induce mood swings in the fretful Wilhelm.”

(…)

“When Parisian onlookers gawped at Edward VII sprawled in a chair outside his hotel smoking a cigar, they felt they were looking at England in the form of a very fat, fashionable and confident man. And who embodied the most disturbing aspects of German foreign policy – its vacillations, lack of coherence and angry, frustrated ambition – better than the febrile, tactless, panic-prone, overbearing Wilhelm, the man who dared to advise Edvard Grieg on how to conduct Peer Gynt? He may not have made German policy, but he certainly personified it for Germany’s opponents. As symbolic persons, monarchs could become powerful tools for understanding – and misunderstanding – international relations.”

Read the article here.

The monarchs are fairly often poor victims of their upbringing – it might be time to watch once again “The White Ribbon “ by Michael Haneke – but republics are no guarantee for better outcomes (Weimar).

Any politician can be sidelined by a Rasputin.

Kaiser Wilhelm II on July 30 1914 scribbling notes to blame his uncle for the great war that was to come is delightfully (forgive me this word) absurd and tragic at the same time.
Compared to Kaiser Wilhelm II the scribbles of the late Donald Rumsfeld about Iraq and torture breathe the air of a sinister rationality.
Which is not to say that Mr. Rumsfeld was like the Kaiser the victim of a poor upbringing. We should not everything blame on our parents.

And at least contemporary politics is less a web of family feuds. I’m not sure if this is really advantageous, but least the people can feel responsible because they voted for these men and women who represent them in a highly symbolic way. (By the way, I would argue that most French presidents discreetly believed they were monarchs. Hollande might have been an exception; he was too much aware of his incompetence.)

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