by Simon Winder
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Dreams of Corfu » Walls and bridges » The Kingdom of Mattresses » The road to Strasbourg » Armageddon » Charlemagne comes home
Dreams of Corfu
A few miles outside Utrecht is a grand house which must have a fair claim to be one of the most resonant sites in Europe. If part of the point of sitting in a church is to dwell on human transience and folly, then this house would qualify as a religious building. Wandering through its mournful rooms the visitor is caught in a labyrinth of horror, and at its heart, popped on a chair in its former owner’s bedroom, is a pretty cushion stitched with the words Deutschland, Deutschland, über Alles, über in der Welt.
Kaiser Wilhelm lived for over twenty years in Huis Doorn, becoming older and older, plotting and fantasizing, ranting and cheese-paring. As he died after the German occupation of the Netherlands in 1940, his house was briefly inherited by his family. Hitler’s defeat then allowed the Dutch government to confiscate it. This sequence of events meant that the entire house was kept intact, exactly as Wilhelm had arranged it, and not sold off or looted. To wander around Huis Doorn then is to sink into the Kaiser’s vision of home-furnishings – this bust, this pot, this collection of cigarette lighters, this painting of the estate in Corfu which he still owned but would never again be allowed to visit.
The Kaiser’s flight to asylum in the Netherlands was one of the minor yet epochal events of 10 November 1918. Seemingly safe in the German-occupied Belgian town of Spa, surrounded by his generals, and shielded by Europe’s largest employer of the 1910s, the German army, Wilhelm was suddenly brought to realize that far from being Supreme Warlord, he was now just an embarrassment. As the German revolution unfolded across a country exhausted, enraged and despairing, what had only a few weeks earlier been unthinkable suddenly became obvious – Germany had lost, and the tangle of monarchical and imperial regimes that ruled it were at an end. Generation after generation of the Hohenzollern family, traceable to eleventh-century Swabia, were now irrelevant. From being at the apex of the Central Powers, Wilhelm was now a peculiar sort of private individual. One day the government in Berlin had pronounced his abdication; the following day the Armistice ending the war was signed, the German army stood down and the monstrous trench system dissolved.
There is an extraordinary photo of the Kaiser and a few men of his entourage pacing the station platform of the Dutch border town of Eijsden, on the Meuse below Maastricht, on the afternoon of the 10th. Its blurriness makes it all the more spectral, as though the uniforms, deference and Prussian hierarchies stretching back centuries are visibly dissolving. Wilhelm was alert to the unhappy precedent of the slaughter of the Tsar and his family that summer, and realized he might have only hours in which to act. Dumping the classy white-and-gold imperial train on the grounds that just a handful of disgruntled German artillerymen could make short work of it, he fled to the border, pleading with Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands to give him asylum. Aware that any roving band could have grabbed him, Wilhelm stood in Eijsden waiting for permission to proceed, with a catcalling crowd (not shown in the photo) gradually building up around the station.
At midnight Wilhelmina agreed – both the logical result of monarchical solidarity and a practical application of Dutch neutrality – and Wilhelm was whisked to Amerongen Castle, where he had the exquisite humiliation of sleeping in a bed once used by the all-conquering Louis XIV. And so began the Kaiser’s via dolorosa. He bought Huis Doorn the following summer and moved in together with fifty-nine railway cars of goodies from various Berlin and Potsdam locations and millions of marks handed over by an ambivalent, over-legalistic German government. The hope throughout the coming years was that the organic and irresistible nature of Hohenzollern rule would prevail over the mere blip of losing the Great War. The logic of Wilhelm, or at worst of his son, returning to Germany seemed obvious. For many Germans, however, he was the bombastic warmonger who had betrayed them. Even Hitler, who could in some moods see the logic of Wilhelm coming back, realized that he was simply too discredited and unpopular. Indeed the whole world of waxed moustaches, shining cuirasses, ceremonial swords and ostrich feathers had been utterly drained of its magic during the annihilatory course of the war and, perhaps within mere moments of the Armistice, suddenly seemed embarrassing, silly and out-of-date. The Nazis stayed in close contact with Wilhelm, but in the end he was utterly incompatible with their New Germany.
Huis Doorn preserves in aspic this weird leftover. In what can only be seen as either a mania of self-loathing or (I fear this is more likely) dumb lack of imagination, Wilhelm packed Doorn with mementos of his great ancestors, paintings of successful wars and photos of his old palaces. It is hard to know what is worst. Did he spend much time looking at the model Viking ship made out of silver and presented by his fellow twenty-one German sovereigns and the German city states on his Silver Jubilee in 1913? Did he enjoy having all his Scottish stuff – kilt, claymore and sgian-dubh – as a reminder of carefree times at Balmoral as Queen Victoria’s pampered grandson, before he became the Most Hated Man in the World? Did he cry at the frankly insane white marble bust of himself as Frederick the Great, with the familiar Wilhelm features topped by a wig and tricorn hat? His smoking room was filled with things actually owned by Frederick the Great (paintings, snuffboxes, weapons), the mere presence of which would have hag-ridden a more imaginative man. Why didn’t he surround himself with pictures of his most useless predecessors? I would have given myself a more flattering framework by decorating my study with things owned by the hapless and despairing George William or that bulky mystic Frederick William II.
The Allies enjoyed themselves at Versailles, coming up with ever more outlandishly nasty places of exile for Wilhelm and applying pressure on the Dutch to spit him out. There were plans to have a gigantic show-trial in London, but it was pointed out that such an event could undermine the whole principle of monarchy, and get really out of control if the British ruling house’s countless royal German chums popped up. The world drifted on to other things. The security detail at Doorn were terrified of snatch squads, assassins or bounty-hunters sneaking in, and during the winter the moat ice had to be smashed each night – one of the last times in European history when a moat had a real value. But it was a measure of Wilhelm’s draining prestige that nobody even had a go. The horrible indignity of his position made his aides inwardly pray for his death. They assumed that if the Allies successfully extradited him, as their representatives came up the drive he would shoot himself or, failing that, one of his officers would intervene with a quick sword-thrust to prevent the final fiasco of a shuffling, fettered ex-Nibelung Lord in the Tower of London. He grew a beard, initially to make him unrecognizable for if he should do a sudden flit.
The years went by, with everyone sitting around crystal-laden dinner tables in full uniform while the Kaiser prosed away about Jews and Freemasons and ever more baroque conspiracy theories involving the long-term malice of the puppet-master-from-beyond-the-grave Edward VII. There would be champagne toasts when one of his countless German democrat enemies was assassinated or died; rage at the betrayals from Berlin, incredulity about the Ludendorff–Hitler putsch attempt (‘You can’t set up a new Reich from a beer hall!’); euphoria at the Third Reich; delight at British defeat in 1940 (‘The ordeal of Juda-England has begun’): but all as a minor bystander. His notional liberation with the invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940 meant nothing – he could never be allowed back to Berlin and was now in his eighties. He died on 4 June 1941, a few days before Operation Barbarossa sealed the Third Reich’s fate. The complex historical gusts that blew around the graveside can hardly be summarized – the thoroughly evil Reich Commissioner for the Netherlands Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the thoroughly ancient Prussian commander August von Mackensen, who had started his career getting an Iron Cross during the Franco-Prussian War, Wilhelm’s son, the highly notional ‘Wilhelm III’, and a huge wreath from an absent Hitler.
At an unrelieve
dly grim meeting of the French cabinet on 12 June 1940, the Prime Minister Paul Reynaud – as Paris was about to fall and the Germans began to dispose of the Maginot Line – battling a mixture of defeatist and treacherous colleagues, exclaimed to those wanting to cut a deal with Hitler, ‘We’re not dealing with Kaiser Wilhelm but with Genghis Khan.’ It was a measure of the sickening pace of change that the man once seen as the enemy of the world was now the soft option.
Walls and bridges
The young Richard Cobb, who went on to become one of the great historians of France, was in the British army in 1944 when it liberated French Flanders and Belgium. On the basis of awe-inspiring numbers of drinks in uncountable numbers of pubs he built up an unrivalled picture of what life had been like under German occupation in both world wars. In cities like Lille in 1914–18 there had been very few male adults as they were all in the French army. Those remaining were taken off to work in labour battalions. In the first winter most supplies of wood were used up (including things like staircases) to stay warm. For the German army, the French and Belgian civilians were the lowest priority and the blockade hit them before anyone else. Just as the British moved all the inhabitants of Arras and Ypres out, so the Germans did the same for towns like Mons, with Brussels becoming a vast refugee camp. Cobb spoke to one Lillois who remembered the awfulness of Lille station, with its vacant ticket offices and its ever tattier posters boasting of easy, glamorous trips to Paris or Nice, now seemingly for ever on the wrong side of the trench lines. With its huge main square, Lille was ideal for German military parades and many photos survive of row upon row of spike-helmeted troops parading beneath cheery pre-war advertisements for now mockingly unavailable brands such as Persil and Bovril.
Humanitarian organizations were able to make a cynical case to the occupiers for letting trapped civilians out so that feeding these ‘useless mouths’ would become a French headache rather than a German one. Occupied Douai, ingeniously, expelled all its vagrants, prisoners and prostitutes into unoccupied France. The Swiss gradually transferred civilians from places like Lille and Tourcoing down the Rhine, through Basle and across the Jura back into France. Cobb talked to one man who had eventually followed this evacuation route as a child. His memory of Basle was one of astonishment: he had never seen young men not in uniform before.
The issue of young men haunted the inter-war period. Just to restrict the numbers to the four countries that physically faced each other on the Western Front, the war ended with three million dead and ten million ‘wounded’. The latter was a term that encompassed everything from a bullet in the arm to lifelong confined care in one of the huge buildings that now sprang up across Europe. Every country battled to work out its response. The British spent the 1920s and early 1930s creating what are always referred to, correctly but strangely, as the biggest human funerary sites since Ancient Egypt. The Ypres Salient and the Somme became the main focuses for graveyards and carved memorial stones designed to last for ever. Countless friends and relatives would take the ferries each summer to visit the graves in a dreadful form of tourism that created its own new ecosystem of hotels, coaches, taxis and restaurants.
It had originally been planned that Ypres itself would have a central role, with its ruins a permanent focus, but the inhabitants not unreasonably wanted their homes back. It was then decided to make it into a new, modern town to put the past behind a place which had had just too much history. But the inhabitants, again not unreasonably, asked that it should be rebuilt exactly as it had been. Sir Reginald Blomfield, when building the Menin Gate (inspired by the Porte de la Citadelle in Nancy) to commemorate the nearly fifty-five thousand British and Commonwealth troops with no known graves, was driven mad by Belgian obstinacy.1 The sight-line running from the rebuilt Ypres Cloth Hall to the Menin Gate was ruined by a small group of solid citizens who insisted that they would not move their shops a centimetre. These shops are still there, selling a dazing array of offensive kitsch, from chocolate poppies and helmets to Passchendaele beer.
Many of the fifty or so different nationalities fighting in Flanders by 1918 put up monuments – the extraordinary Canadian one at Vimy Ridge for example, the site continuing the region’s irredeemable enthusiasm for exclaves and political anomalies through the French making it permanent Canadian territory. The British signed off with Sir Edward Lutyens’ monument at Thiepval to the Missing of the Somme (some seventy-two thousand men), at a huge ceremony in 1932. I have spent so much time wandering around battlefield cemeteries, but have always found excuses not to go to this. Just in photos it looks unbearable. In any event everything is encapsulated privately and simply in Blomfield’s little St George’s Memorial Church in Ypres, almost anonymous on its corner. Everything inside it was put there to commemorate specific deaths, either within regiments or families or schools, and it still seems to contain a sort of essence of 1920s shock and grief.
The French commemorations focused on Verdun, which became a great national shrine during the inter-war period, with its ossuary containing the bones of some 130,000 unidentified French and German troops, and with a drastically different aesthetic to the British cemeteries. Its formal inauguration happened in the same week as Thiepval, in August 1932. For the British, Thiepval was meant to draw a line under any further British involvement in the Continent. Almost a century had gone by between Waterloo and Mons without any British troops in Europe and it should be at least as long before it happened again. A host of novels, memoirs and poems published throughout the 1920s had, while all the cemeteries were being constructed, gradually turned the British experience from a heroic one to a woefully mismanaged waste. For the French and Belgians the hope that they could actively cow and shape Germany as they had tried to in the Ruhr gave way to increasing fatalism. Both, alongside the funerary monuments, embarked on vast projects which would no longer aspire to dominate the Germans but would simply keep them out. The Belgians, having been invaded once, correctly guessed that if the Germans did it again they would not bother with Dutch neutrality and would instead march straight through the Maastricht appendix and into Belgium. Their response to this possibility was to build the largest fortress in the world, Eben-Emael, which incorporated every technical and military innovation available to the early 1930s. The French went even further, building the Maginot Line, which would seal in Alsace and make any renewed German invasion suicidal. These were not in themselves confident gestures.
In the early thirties a form of what appeared to be gloomy, cynical conservatism ruled Europe, of a kind which only in retrospect would seem attractive. No politician proved able to manoeuvre his country out of the Great Depression. Everybody tried to ignore the critiques from the far right and far left. The characteristically named Centre Party in Germany, with its roots in post-1848 Rhineland Catholicism, tried to hold the line but was so ideologically broad that it was necessarily timid, with disastrous results. Its traditional core was in places such as Koblenz and Cologne which had been most humiliated by the Occupation. Its breadth from left to right meant that it had housed both Matthias Erzberger, who had signed the Versailles Treaty for Germany and been duly shot dead by a right-wing hit squad in 1921, and the oleaginous Franz von Papen, whose catastrophic, silly manoeuvrings let in Hitler. The Centre Party confusingly therefore included both figures who had administered the ‘stab in the back’ which had betrayed the German nation and war dead, and figures who believed in such a theory. This meant that the Rhineland was in some ways both a sufficient bulwark against Nazism that Hitler viewed it (in an echo of Bismarck) with great suspicion, and nonetheless hopelessly suggestible to Nazi revisionism.
The process by which Hitler came to power in 1933 was focused on Berlin, but was at every point really about the Western Front. While the Nazis only ever received a third of votes they could, once they had seized power, rely on a vastly greater constituency created by those who believed that 1918 had been a trick. The many conservative army officers who despised Hitler and were hated by him in t
urn almost all agreed about the need to break the shackles of Versailles. Germany had been so shaken about, starved, criminalized and filled, from the Republic’s founding, with untruths about why and how the Great War had ended that it was always doomed to undo its humiliations. The French and Belgians had tried to control Germany and keep it down with the occupation of the Ruhr, but by 1924 had been persuaded of its futility by the British and Americans. After that they concluded that they had little choice but to wall themselves in and hope for the best – the work on their vast fortress systems began with Germany still a democracy and Hitler far from power.
The glamorous, militaristic Third Reich found support not only from those wishing to overturn Versailles but also from those fearing and hating Communism, conservatives who might have otherwise still stayed distanced from Hitler. The extra disaster lay in Hitler’s chaotic ideology happening to include rabid anti-Semitism – this had the worst implications, but it was possible to imagine a just as violent, dictatorial and warlike German regime without this emphasis (under, say, Hitler’s predecessor as chancellor, General von Schleicher, who in his short reign had used many of the same military trappings – and who Hitler murdered during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934).