Frederick’s illness and approaching death summoned up poisons from the vast reservoir of Prussian antagonism to England. Already in September 1887, when the Crown Prince was leaving England to recuperate in Italy, Friederich von Holstein, First Counselor of the German Foreign Ministry, was spewing venom at the sick man’s wife: “The Crown Princess’s behavior is typical.88 Gay and carefree, with but one idea—never to return to Prussia. I persist in my view, which is now shared by others, namely that from the very beginning she accepted the idea that the worst would happen. Judging by all I have heard of her in recent months, I am tempted to call her a degenerate or corrupt character. Nature and pressure have combined to produce this effect. She came here thirty years ago, her father’s spoiled darling, convinced she was a political prodigy. Far from acquiring influence here, she saw herself obliged to renounce any kind of open political activity and to conform to the restraint of the Prussian court which she hated. She has always despised her husband. She will greet his death as the moment of deliverance.”
The new Crown Prince, William, torn between grief for his father and the prospect of becoming German Emperor, had little sympathy for “the English princess who is my mother,”89 as he described her at the time. She had taken control of his father’s medical treatment; now, as a result, his father was dying, and she was attempting to prevent father and son from meeting. At that time—and even more strongly as the years went by—William placed heavy blame on the English Dr. Mackenzie. “The decisive interference90 of the Englishman Mackenzie... had the most disastrous consequences,” William wrote. He questioned “whether the Englishman really pronounced his diagnosis in good faith. I am convinced that this was not the case.... He was out, not only after money, but also after the English aristocracy [referring to Mackenzie’s knighthood]fn2.... When one considers that, if the English doctor had not intervened, my father would in all probability have been saved, one will understand how it was that I took every opportunity of opposing... this ostrich policy. That my mother could not free herself from the Englishman’s authority, even when the facts had become clear to everyone else, had the worst possible effect upon my relations with her.” William absolved his mother of the decision to summon an English doctor and of the specific choice of Mackenzie; he admitted that this was the “unanimous” decision of the Berlin doctors. But few in Germany knew this. Before long, it was a general belief in Germany that the English Crown Princess had insisted on summoning an English doctor, had insisted on following his incompetent advice against the recommendation of a phalanx of German physicians, and thus—even if she was not guilty of Holstein’s vicious charge—was responsible for the needless death of a German emperor.
Early in June, Frederick, suffering from an abscess in the tracheotomy site and intermittent high fevers, was moved from the Charlottenburg Palace to the New Palace at Potsdam, where he had been born. In splendid weather he sat on a terrace and looked out at the gardens of Sans Souci, blazing with spring colors. On the morning of June 13, his friend King Oscar of Sweden visited him. The following day, Bismarck came to say farewell. Frederick reached for the Chancellor’s hand and gave it to his wife. That evening, Frederick could not swallow even liquid food. Queen Victoria, receiving almost hourly telegrams at Balmoral, telegraphed William, “Am in greatest distress92 at this terrible news and so troubled about poor dear Mama. Do all you can, as I asked you, to help her at this terrible time of dreadful trial and grief. God help us!” Frederick III died early in the morning of June 15.
“I am broken-hearted,”93 Queen Victoria telegraphed her grandson. “Help and do all you can for your poor dear mother.... Grandmama.” To Vicky, she wrote: “Darling, darling, unhappy child,94 you are far more sorely tried than me. I had not the agony of seeing another fill the place of my Angel husband, which I always felt I never could have borne!” In her journal that night, the Queen wrote, “None of my own sons95 could be a greater loss. He was so good, so wise, and so fond of me!” The Prince of Wales wrote to his son, Prince George (later King George V): “Try, my dear Georgy,96 never to forget Uncle Fritz. He was one of the finest and noblest characters ever known. If he had a fault he was too good for this world.”
Kaiser William II’s first act was to throw a cordon of soldiers around the New Palace, where his father lay dead. No one could enter or leave the palace without permission; when Vicky, now Dowager Empress, went to the windows, she saw the red uniforms of the hussars patrolling the grounds. William was convinced that his mother would try to smuggle away to England his father’s private papers. Officers went through the private rooms, opening drawers and searching in closets. Nothing was found. Two days later, Queen Victoria wrote in her journal: “Colonel Swaine arrived from Berlin.97... He had brought some papers which Fritz had desired should be placed in my care.”
The Prince of Wales hurried to Berlin for the funeral and found his sister bitterly angry. At William’s command, despite her pleading, a postmortem was being performed on Frederick’s body to verify the cancer and embarrass the English doctor—and the English Princess. When Vicky had attempted to see Prince Bismarck to persuade him to stop the postmortem, the Chancellor had sent word that he was too busy. William was making all the plans for his father’s funeral, ignoring his mother’s wishes; ultimately, she refused to attend the state funeral and held her own private service. The name Friedrichskron, which Frederick had given to the New Palace in his final days, was summarily changed back, on William’s instructions, to New Palace.
Queen Victoria felt the chill emanating from the new regime and repaid it in kind. On June 27, General Winterfeldt arrived from Berlin, bringing a formal letter to the Queen announcing William’s accession. Soon, the new Kaiser was complaining about the cold manner in which his envoy had been received at Windsor Castle. The Queen wrote to her Private Secretary: “The Queen is extremely glad98 to hear that General Winterfeldt says he was received coldly... for such was her intention. He was a traitor to his beloved master, and never mentioned his name even, or a word of regret and spoke of the pleasure... at being chosen to announce his new master’s accession. Could the Queen, devoted as she is to the dear memory of the beloved and noble Emperor Frederick, to whom, and [to] her daughter, General Winterfeldt has behaved so treacherously, receive him otherwise?” Five days later, the Queen tried a warmer approach with her grandson: “Let me ask you to bear with poor Mama99 if she is sometimes irritated and excited. She does not mean it so; think what months of agony and suspense and watching with broken and sleepless nights she has gone through, and don’t mind it. I am so anxious that all should go smoothly, that I write thus openly in the interests of both.” The Queen then turned to another troubling matter. “There are many rumors100 of your going and paying visits to Sovereigns. I hope that at least you will let some months pass before anything of this kind takes place, as it is not three weeks yet since dear beloved Papa was taken, and we are still in such deep mourning for him.” William rebuffed his grandmother. He would soon be taking his fleet up the Baltic, “where I hope to meet101 the Emperor of Russia which will be of good effect for the peace of Europe.... I would have gone later if possible, but State interest goes before personal feelings and the fate which hangs over nations does not wait till the etiquette of Court mournings has been fulfilled.... I deem it necessary that monarchs should meet often and confer together to look out for dangers which threaten the monarchical principle from democratical and republican parties in all parts of the world. It is far better that we Emperors keep firm together.” Queen Victoria was not amused. To Lord Salisbury, her Prime Minister, she telegraphed: “Trust that we shall be very cool,102 though civil, in our communications with my grandson and Prince Bismarck, who are bent on a return to the oldest times of government.”
fn1 Elizabeth’s younger sister Irene, twelve in 1878, would marry William’s brother, Henry. Another sister, Alix, who was six in 1878, was to marry Tsar Nicholas II and become the Empress Alexandra of Russia.
fn2 W
illiam’s charge was exaggerated, but Mackenzie, confronted by growing evidence that his diagnosis had been wrong, behaved evasively. In November 1887, after the Crown Prince had been told he had cancer, Mackenzie insisted to Queen Victoria’s doctor that, the previous June when he had prevented an operation, there had been no malignancy. In January 1888, when Fritz was struggling to breathe and shortly before his tracheotomy, Mackenzie told the Queen at Osborne that “though he fully believed91 that there was nothing malignant, he could not say so positively for another six months.” For the rest of his life, Mackenzie struggled to rebut the charge of misdiagnosis in this, his most famous case. His charge that the clumsiness of German physicians caused Fritz unnecessary suffering resulted in his expulsion from the Royal College of Surgeons for violating confidentiality and for unethical conduct. Mackenzie remained in private practice, but bitterness and controversy destroyed his health. In 1892, four years after his royal patient, Mackenzie died.
Chapter 3
“Blood and Iron”
After Waterloo and the dispatch of Napoleon Bonaparte to St. Helena, the Congress of Vienna redrew the map of Germany. The three hundred German kingdoms, electorates, principalities, grand duchies, bishoprics, and free cities which had made up the old Holy Roman Empire, bound by lip service to the Hapsburg Emperor in Vienna, were reconstituted into a loose confederation of thirty-nine states. Most remained small, a few were tiny, and there were five sovereign kingdoms: Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, Hanover, and Württemberg. A Federal Diet to which all states sent representatives was established in the free city of Frankfurt on the Main. Its purpose was to settle disputes between the German states and, above all, to preserve the conservative status quo. In Germany and in the Diet, Austria—strictly speaking, not a German power at all—remained predominant. She possessed the prestige of an imperial ruler, the skillful diplomacy of the post-Napoleonic era’s dominant statesman, Prince Clemens von Metternich, and the largest army in Central Europe.
Prussia, largest and strongest of the purely German states, was approaching Great Power status. Blücher’s Prussians had relieved Wellington’s exhausted army and turned the tide at Waterloo. The Congress of Vienna had added significant territories in the Rhineland and Westphalia to the Prussian Kingdom and the black and white flag with the Prussian double eagle now flew from Aachen and Coblenz to Königsberg near the Russian frontier. The new lands in the west, among the most densely populated in Germany, were heavily Roman Catholic, and rich in mineral wealth and industrial potential. One of the King of Prussia’s newly acquired subjects was the ironmaster of Essen, Friedrich Krupp. The Prussian state, traditionally Protestant, overwhelmingly rural, with its Spartan military tradition, nevertheless remained inferior to Austria in one essential ingredient of national power: population. In 1815, there were 10 million Prussians, compared to 30 million Frenchmen and 30 million subjects of the Austrian emperor.
Through the first half of the nineteenth century, the drive towards German unification gained momentum, speeded by the growth of industry and railways. In 1834, a Prussian-organized customs union (Zollverein) lowered tariff barriers; in the 1850s, a doubling of trackage in the German railway network brought all German states within hours of one another. Coal mined in the Saar and in Silesia heated industrial furnaces in the Ruhr. The ports of Bremen and Hamburg exported and imported goods for the whole of Germany. Yet fifty years after the Congress of Vienna, Germany remained a loose political confederation of thirty-nine states. Austria, continuing to dominate the Federal Diet in Frankfurt, opposed any change; France, again risen to primacy in Europe under a new Emperor, Napoleon III, reinforced Austria’s policy. The statesman who changed this—who expelled Austria from Germany, defeated France and toppled Napoleon III, unified Germany, created the German Empire, and transferred the capital of Continental Europe from Paris or Vienna to Berlin—was Otto von Bismarck.
For twenty-eight years (1862–1890), the greatest German political figure since the Middle Ages loomed over Germany and Europe. Bismarck’s very appearance created an image of force and intimidation. Over six feet tall, with broad shoulders, a powerful chest, and long legs, he gave up wearing civilian frock coats when he became Imperial Chancellor and appeared only in military uniform: Prussian blue tunic, spiked helmet, and long black cavalry boots which extended over the thigh. The top of his head was bald before he reached fifty, but thick hair continued to sprout and tumble over his ears, in bushy eyebrows, and in a heavy bushy mustache. The eyes, wide apart and heavily pouched, glittered with intelligence and flashed with authority. Despite the aura of power surrounding this huge frame, there were contradictions: Bismarck’s hands and feet were small, even delicate; his waist, before it turned to paunch, was abnormally narrow; his voice was not the deep bass or resonant baritone one might expect—it was a thin, high, reedy, almost piping tenor.
Bismarck’s character was equally complex and contradictory. His greatest gift was intelligence; he possessed intellectual ascendancy over all the politicians of his time, German or European, and all—German and European—acknowledged this. He was self-confident, even daring, to the point of recklessness. He combined indomitable will and tenacity of purpose in reaching long-range goals with resourcefulness, suppleness, and virtuosity in improvising means. Bismarck was willing to work indefatigably, with exuberant energy, to create political and diplomatic situations from which he could profit; he was equally ready to seize an unexpected prize suddenly offered. His manner could be genial and charming; subordinates and enemies more often saw cunning, ruthlessness, unscrupulousness, brutality, and cruelty. Underneath, not surprisingly, lay restlessness, anger, myriad grievances, jealousy, and pettiness. Bismarck’s politics and diplomacy were based on practical experience and he disdained theorists and sentimentalists. Near the end of his career, he was moody, suspicious, and misanthropic, bowed by the endlessly complicated business of governing. In Germany, he had no friends or colleagues, only subordinates. His assistant at the Foreign Ministry, Friedrich von Holstein, said that Bismarck treated people “not as friends, but as tools, like knives and forks,1 which are changed after each course.”
Not all Germans approved of Bismarck. German liberals had fought for national unity, but they had wanted to achieve it in a democratic, parliamentary form, not have it thrust upon the nation by a powerful, conservative statesman wielding the power of a primitive, disciplined military state. Nevertheless, Bismarck had his way. He was the strongest personality and the most powerful political force Europe had known since Napoleon I. From the moment in 1862 when King William I of Prussia reluctantly made the Junker diplomat his Minister-President, Germany and Europe entered the Age of Bismarck.
Otto von Bismarck was born on April 1, 1815, two and a half months before the Battle of Waterloo, in Schönhausen in Prussia, near the Elbe River west of Berlin. His father, Ferdinand, a minor nobleman, possessed a typical Junker estate with cattle, sheep, wheatfields, and timber. The Junkers, whose nearest approximation was the rough English country squirearchy, lived close to the land, often milking their own cows, running their own sawmills, and selling their own wool at market. Although they worked their estates, they were proud of their ancient lineage. Bismarck sprang from a family older in Prussia than the Hohenzollerns, who had come from Stuttgart in 1415; Prussia’s kings, Bismarck once said, derive from “a Swabian family2 no better than mine.” Most Junkers were pious, rigid, and frugal, devoted to the land, to the Protestant church, and to their monarch, whose army they officered and government they administered. They cared nothing for the rest of the world and little for the rest of Germany; Bismarck himself never regarded South Germans or Catholic Germans as true Germans. Junkers were not interested in the great capitals of Europe: Paris, Vienna, and London. If they looked beyond their villages at all, it was to Berlin, the growing capital of their Spartan military state.
Ferdinand von Bismarck was a dull, easygoing Junker who managed his estate with only modest success. His wife, Wilhelmine, was a per
sonality of striking contrast. The daughter of Ludwig Mencken, the trusted counselor of Frederick the Great, she had been brought up in Berlin, where she eagerly absorbed everything the capital had to offer. Her father died when she was nine and, in gratitude for his services, the royal family took Wilhelmine in hand and brought her up with the Hohenzollern children. Her marriage at sixteen to the ponderous, rustic nobleman over twice her age was considered a sound match—she was a commoner—but it was a mistake. Marooned on a farm, she compensated by ignoring her husband and concentrating on her children. She encouraged intelligence, ambition, restlessness, and energy, but gave little affection. At six, Otto was dispatched to school in Berlin, where he remained until he was sixteen. He grew up a strange mixture of his dissimilar parents: a tall, increasingly bulky boy, with a highly educated, tempestuous, romantic, passionate nature, bursting with strength and determination. In the words of a biographer, “he was the clever, sophisticated son3 of a clever, sophisticated mother masquerading all his life as his heavy, earthy father.”
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