The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  To the “artist-geniuses” of real life Zarathustra was irresistible. In Paris when a friend read passages of it to the peasant-born sculptor Rodin, one of the great movers of art forms of his time, he became so interested that he returned every evening until the whole book had been read aloud. At the end, after a long silence, he said, “What a subject to put into bronze!” Under the same thrall Strauss saw the subject in music and in fact Nietzsche himself had written that the whole of Zarathustra “might be considered as music.” It was not Strauss’s intention to set Nietzsche’s text to music but, modestly, “to convey musically an idea of the development of the human race from its origin through the various phases of evolution, religious as well as scientific, up to Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch.” The whole was to be his “homage to the genius of Nietzsche.”

  When it became known that Germany’s most advanced composer was at work on a tone poem inspired by Germany’s most advanced philosopher, admirers grew nervous and enemies sharpened their pens. The finished piece, composed over a period of seven months in 1896 and scored for thirty-one woodwinds and brasses, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, triangle, glockenspiel, two harps and organ beside the usual strings, took thirty-three minutes’ playing time, almost twice as long as Till, and was performed under the composer’s baton within three months of its completion. Trumpets sounded the opening, swelling into an immense orchestral paean by the whole ensemble which seemed to depict less the sunrise stated in the program notes than the creation of the world. Its magnificence was breathtaking. The end came with twelve strokes of a low bell gradually dying away to a pianissimo trembling of strings and winds and ending in the famous “enigma” of a B major chord in the treble register against a dark mysterious C in the bass. In between there was again the Strauss wizardry of polyphonic effect and enough musical ideas for a dozen pieces: “Science” was expressed by a fugue containing the twelve tones of the chromatic scale and the Dance theme of girls in a meadow, introduced by high flutes in a halting waltz rhythm, seemed to catch all the joy and freshness of a green world. It was, however, more Viennese than Bacchic and somehow cheapened by bells and triangles. Three days after the premiere Zarathustra was performed again in Berlin and within the year in all the major German cities as well as in Paris, Chicago and New York, evoking from critics new excesses of both savagery and eulogy. To Hanslick it was “tortured and repulsive,” to the American James Huneker “dangerously sublime,” to the eminent musicologist Richard Batka “a milestone in modern musical history” and Strauss “pre-eminently the composer of our time.”

  In Germany because of the plethora of performances, with a festival every week and continuing operas, concerts, choral societies and chamber music, success was almost too easy; orchestras were ready to grasp a composition the instant it was finished. “There is too much music in Germany,” wrote Romain Rolland in italics. As an observer deeply interested both in music and in Germany, he explained: “This is not a paradox. There is no worse misfortune for art than a superabundance of it.” Germany, Rollańd thought (not without French bias), “has let loose a flood of music and is drowning in it,” a situation which did not leave Strauss unaffected. Early prominence and now pre-eminence in his field and confident mastery of his medium afflicted him with a desire to dazzle, and in his next composition, Don Quixote, he let his affinity for realism run unreined.

  Realism was a German passion. Brünhilde at Bayreuth was always accompanied by a live horse which, affected by equine stage fright or the galloping music of the Valkyrie, invariably misbehaved in the middle of the stage to the relish of the German audience if not of visiting foreigners. The painter Philip Ernst, father of Max Ernst, when painting a picture of his garden omitted a tree which spoiled the composition and then, overcome with remorse at this offence against realism, cut down the tree. When Strauss used a wind machine in Don Quixote to represent the turning sails of the windmills, people could not be blamed for wondering if this were not carrying literalism to inartistic excess. His muted brasses representing the bleating of sheep aroused the critics’ scorn, although it could not be denied that he conveyed with extraordinary skill not only the sound of bleating but a sense, almost a view, of the crowded mass of animals moving and shoving against each other.

  The critics’ blasts only added to Strauss’s notoriety and drew greater crowds to his concerts. At thirty-four, admitted the English critic Ernest Newman, he was “the most talked of musician in the world.” Although the Kaiser disapproved of his music, the German capital could not afford to do without him. Six months after the premiere of Don Quixote he was offered and accepted the conductorship of the Berlin Royal Opera.

  Berlin meant Prussia, the natural enemy of Munich and Bavaria. The North German regarded the South German as easy-going and self-indulgent, a sentimentalist who tended to be deplorably democratic, even liberal. In his turn, the South German regarded the North German as an arrogant bully with bad manners and an insolent stare who was politically reactionary and aggressively preoccupied with business.

  Architecturally, Berlin, Europe’s third largest city, was new and not beautiful. It belonged in style to what in America was called the Gilded Age. Its main public buildings, streets and squares, built or rebuilt since 1870 to house suitably the new national grandeur, were heavily pretentious and florid with gilding. Unter den Linden, a mile long with a double avenue of trees, was laid out with obvious intent to be the biggest and most beautiful boulevard in Europe. It ended naturally in an Arch of Triumph at the Brandenburg Gate. The gate led in turn to the famous Sieges Allee in the Tiergarten, with its glittering marble rows of helmeted Hohenzollerns in triumphant attitudes. When the statues were raised at the Kaiser’s direction, Max Liebermann, who had a studio overlooking the Tiergarten, lamented, “All I can do is to wear blue goggles but it is a life sentence.” The imposing Reichstag building was of maximum size to make up for its minimum powers. Along the Leipzigerstrasse and Friedrichstrasse, department stores and the head offices of banks and mercantile houses bulged with the rich excitement of business that was growing daily. The city was spotlessly clean and the population so orderly that a Berlin landlady’s bill included three pfennings for sewing on a trouser button and twenty for removing an inkstain. Police were efficient, though an English visitor found them “extremely rough and even brutal.” The lure of vice was aggressively flaunted, food was uninteresting, ladies unfashionable. Prussian thrift stifled elegance. Berlin women of the middle class wore homemade clothes with plaid blouses, muddy-brown skirts, sack coats like traveling rugs, square-toed boots and nondescript hats that went with everything and matched nothing. They had stout figures, raw complexions and wore their hair pulled back and pinned in a braided coil.

  Society, owing to the lack of intercourse between its rigidly maintained categories, was stiff and dull. Unless ennobled by a von, businessmen, merchants, professional men, literary and artistic people were not hoffähig, that is, not received at court and did not mix socially with the nobility. Nor did they mix among each other. Every German belonged to a Kreis, or circle of his own kind whose edges were not allowed to overlap those of the next one. The wife of a Herr Geheimrat or Herr Doktor did not speak to the wife of a tradesman, nor she to the wife of an artisan. To congregate or entertain or marry outside of Kreis borders invited disorder, the thing Germans feared most. Perhaps to compensate for social monotony, some Germans, according to one report, ate seven meals a day.

  Since the unification of Germany had been accomplished under the leadership of Prussia, the ruling caste was drawn from the landowning Junkers, or Prussian nobility, who were numerous, poor and backward. Looked down on by the Catholic nobility of Württemberg and Bavaria as coarse, tasteless and unfitted for social leadership, the Junkers made up in assertiveness what they lacked in education. They dominated the Army, which in Germany dominated the State, and in the wake of Bismarck, their greatest exponent, filled most of the government offices though not the business life of the capita
l, which was grasping and intense. Though an anti-commercial class, they were its willing agents and their Government was the most frankly commercial in Europe. The Kaiser, who admired money, included in his circle the wealthier and more cosmopolitan non-Prussian nobility. Court life was notable for minute rules of behavior and immense state dinners accompanied by very loud music. Jews, unless converted, were not received, with the occasional exception of a Court Jew, like the Kaiser’s friend Albert Ballin. Although the Jews numbered about one per cent of the population, anti-Semitism was fashionable, stimulated by their rapid progress in science and the arts, business and the professions after legal emancipation was confirmed for the Empire in 1871. Despite the emancipation, however, professing Jews were excluded from political, military and academic posts and from the ranks of the von, an exclusion which, fortunately for Germany, did not make them feel any less devotedly German. Bleichroder, the banker who gave Bismarck the necessary credit for the Franco-Prussian War; Ballin, the developer of maritime trade; Emil Rathenau, founder of the Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft, which electrified Germany; Fritz Haber, discoverer of the process for fixing nitrogen from the air, which made Germany independent of imported sources of nitrogen for explosives, were all born Jews and among them were responsible for a major proportion of Germany’s booming energies. The German ruling class was likewise supported by an intensely industrious middle and lower class who applied themselves earnestly and worked incessantly, taking few holidays. They were better educated on the whole than those of other countries. Prussia had enforced full-time school attendance for children from seven to fourteen since the 1820’s and by the nineties had two and a half times as many university students in proportion to the population as England.

  The sovereign who ruled over this thriving people was busy and dynamic like them, but more restless than thorough. He was into everything and alert to everything, sometimes with useful results. When the Barnum and Bailey Circus played Germany in 1901, the Kaiser, hearing about the remarkable speed with which trains were loaded, sent officers to observe the method. They learned that instead of loading heavy equipment separately on each freight car from the side, the circus people laid connecting iron treads through the whole length of the train on which all equipment, loaded from one end, could be rolled straight through. By this means three trains, of twenty-two cars each, could be loaded in an hour. The circus technique promptly went to feed the insatiable appetite for speed of the German mobilization system. The Kaiser’s observers also noted the advantages of the great circus cooking wagons over stationary field kitchens, and adopted them for the Army so that meals could be cooked on the move.

  The Kaiser took immense care always to wear appropriate uniform for every occasion. When the Moscow Art Theatre played Berlin, he attended the performance in Russian uniform. He liked to arrange military pageants and festivals, especially the annual spring and autumn parades of the Berlin garrison on the huge Tempelhof Field, where formations of 50,000 troops, equivalent to several divisions, could maneuver. He felt himself no less an authority on the arts, on which he held decided if not advanced views. When Gerhart Hauptmann, author of The Weavers, a gloomy working-class drama, was designated by the judges to receive the Schiller Prize in 1896, the Kaiser awarded it instead to Ernst von Wildenbruch, a favorite of his own who produced historical dramas in the style of William Tell. When the Rhodes scholarships were established, the Kaiser nominated Germany’s candidates, “vulgar rich people,” according to a member of Balliol, “who don’t have a good effect at all.” One shot a deer in Magdalen College park and had to be recalled by the embarrassed monarch’s order. The Kaiser liked to think of himself, as he explained in his speech dedicating the Sieges Allee in 1901, as an “art-loving prince … around whom artists could gather” and in whose reign the arts could flourish as in classical times “in the direct intercourse of the employer with the artist.” As the employer in this case, he had given to the sculptors of the statues “clear and intelligible tasks” and “ordered and defined” their work but thereafter left them free to carry out his ideas. He could now take pride in the results, which were “untainted by so-called modern tendencies.”

  Art, he announced, should represent the Ideal. “To us Germans great ideals, lost to other peoples, have become permanent possessions” which “only the German people” can preserve. He cited the educational effect of art upon the lower classes, who after a hard working day could be lifted out of themselves by contemplation of beauty and the Ideal. But, he sternly warned, “when art descends into the gutter as so often nowadays, choosing to represent misery as even more unlovely than it is already,” then art “sins against the German people.” As the country’s ruler he felt deeply hurt when the masters of art “do not with sufficient energy oppose such tendencies.”

  The theatre too, he explained in 1898, should contribute to culture of the soul, elevate morals and “inculcate respect for the highest traditions of our German Fatherland.” So that the Royal Theatre, which he invariably referred to as “my theatre,” should perform this function, he arranged a series of his favorite historical dramas for working-class attendance at suitable prices. He was a stickler for accuracy of detail in scenery and costumes and, for a ballet-pantomime on Sardanapalus, ransacked the museums of the world for information on Assyrian chariots.

  He liked to attend and even personally direct rehearsals at the Royal Opera and Royal Theatre. Driving up in his Imperial black and yellow motorcar, he would establish himself at a big business-like table in the auditorium, furnished with a pile of paper and array of pencils. An aide in uniform stood alongside and held up his hand whenever the Kaiser signed to him, whereupon the performance halted, the Kaiser with gestures explained what improvements he wanted, and the actors tried again. He referred to the actors as “meine Schauspieler,” and once when one of them, Max Pohl, was suddenly taken ill, he said to an acquaintance, “Fancy, my Pohl had a seizure yesterday.” The acquaintance, thinking he meant a pet dog who had had a fit, commiserated, “Ach, the poor brute.”

  In music the Kaiser’s tastes were naturally conservative. He liked Bach, the greatest of all, and Handel. As regards opera, to which he was devoted if it was German, he would say, “Gluck is the man for me; Wagner is too noisy.” At performances he stayed to the end and frequently commanded concerts at the Palace, whose programs he arranged himself and whose rehearsals he attended, expecting them to have been rehearsed previously and everything to run smoothly. On a trip to Norway he summoned Grieg to an audience at the German Legation and having assembled an orchestra of forty players, placed two chairs in front for himself and the composer, who was requested to conduct the Peer Gynt Suite. During the music the Kaiser continually corrected the composer’s tempi and expression and swayed his body in “oriental movements” in time to Anitra’s dance which “quite electrified him.” Next day the whole performance was repeated by a full orchestra on board the Imperial yacht, Hohenzollern.

  Admiration for the Kaiser during the early part of his reign was a national cult. After the prolonged rule of his grandfather, Wilhelm I, followed by the painful three months’ reign of a dying man, the advent of a young and vigorous monarch who obviously relished his role and played up to the glamour of a king was welcomed by the nation. His flashing eye and martial attitudes, his heroic poses enhanced by all that brilliant dress and stirring music could add, thrilled his subjects. Young men went to the court hairdresser to have their moustaches turned up in points by a special curling device; officers and bureaucrats practiced flashing their eyes; employers addressed their workers in the Kaiser’s most dynamic style, as did Diederich, title character of Heinrich Mann’s harsh satire of Wilhelmine Germany, Der Unterthan (The Loyal Subject): “I have taken the rudder into my own hands,” he says on inheriting the family factory. “My course is set straight and I am guiding you to glorious times. Those who wish to help me are heartily welcome; whoever opposes me I will smash. There is only one master here and I am h
e. I am responsible only to God and my own conscience. You can always count on my fatherly benevolence but revolutionary sentiments will be shattered against my unbending will.” The workers stare at him dumb with amazement and his assembled family with awe and respect.

  The first half of the Kaiser’s reign which began in 1888 coincided with the first flush of the Nietzschean cult. The monarch’s ceaseless activity in every kind of endeavor made him seem to be the universal man, as if, rightfully in Germany, crowning the century of her greatest development, Übermensch had appeared, where else but at the head of the nation. Hero-worship was the natural consequence. Diederich in the novel sees the Kaiser for the first time at the head of a mounted squadron as he rides out with a face of “stony seriousness” to meet a workers’ demonstration at the Brandenburger Tor. Transported by loyalty, the workers, who have been shouting “Bread! Work!” now wave their hats and cry, “Follow him! Follow the Emperor!” Running alongside, Diederich stumbles and sits down violently in a puddle with his legs in the air, splashed with muddy water. The Kaiser, catching sight of him, slaps his thigh and says to his aide with a laugh, “There’s a royalist for you; there’s a loyal subject!” Diederich stares after him “from the depths of his puddle, open-mouthed.”