by Susan Ronald
The oily and self-important foreign minister Count Bernhard von Bülow, who would scribble the kaiser’s latest wishes on his shirt cuffs, sermonized freely on Belgian acquiescence.7 It was simple common sense that the Belgians wouldn’t resist, he claimed, rubbing his hands together in full triumphalist zeal. Unfortunately for Bülow’s pride, the kaiser had other ideas, and offered the notoriously greedy Belgian king, Leopold, two million pounds sterling to secure Belgian neutrality.8 Leopold was so aghast that he left his meeting with the kaiser wearing his ceremonial helmet backward.
France, on the other hand, was mindful of the kaiser’s hostile intent. After the invidious defeat in 1871, and the declaration of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, France had walled herself in by virtue of two fortified entrenched lines: Belfort-Epinal and Toul-Verdun, guarding the eastern front, and Maubeuge-Valenciennes-Lille, watching over the western half of the Belgian frontier. “France will have but one thought,” Victor Hugo wrote, “to reconstitute her forces, gather her energy, nourish her sacred anger, raise her young generation to form an army of the whole people … then one day she will be irresistible. Then she will take back Alsace-Lorraine.”9
Fear of the powerful Teutonic empires at the heart of Europe continued to engender new alliances. Serbia sought reassurances from Russia while Austria-Hungary, threatened by anti-Habsburg propaganda emanating from Serbia, wanted to push its way with its Drang nach Osten—or drive to the East—bolstered by German arms. Of course, this conflicted sharply with czarist Russia’s “historic mission” of acquiring Constantinople and the Bosporus Strait, as well as its time-honored protection of the Slavic peoples. London had tired of voicing its alarm that the German demand for its “place in the sun” was against Britain’s interests. It was time to increase pressure on the kaiser to rethink his policies.
* * *
Meanwhile, in Vienna, Hitler learned his future despotic craft by watching the Austrian Social Democrats, Georg von Schönerer’s Pan-German nationalists, and Vienna’s own Karl Lueger and his Christian Social Party. Not surprisingly, it would be from the Social Democrats that he would discover the power of mass demonstrations and propaganda.
“I gazed on the interminable ranks, four abreast, of Viennese workmen parading at a mass demonstration,” Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf. “I stood dumbfounded for almost two hours, watching this enormous human dragon which slowly uncoiled itself before me.”10 Georg von Schönerer and his Pan-Germans—the antisocialist, anti-Semitic, anti-Habsburg organ seeking to unite through hatred—taught Hitler his greatest lessons. “The art of leadership consists of consolidating the attention of the people against a single adversary and taking care that nothing will split up this attention.… The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to one category.”11
Again, Vienna’s mayor, Karl Lueger, was the only person to succeed in Hitler’s eyes in creating a mass movement—despite the glaring fact that Lueger’s anti-Semitism was based on religious and economic arguments, not on race like Hitler’s. In a remark that Hermann Göring would later echo, Lueger proclaimed, “I decide who is a Jew.” Still, it was Lueger’s rejection of German supremacy over the Habsburg state, with its multiethnic origins, that most perplexed young Hitler. Later, he’d write that the Austrian “leaders recognized the value of propaganda on a large scale and they were veritable virtuosos in working up the spiritual instincts of the broad masses of their electorate.”12
Like Hitler’s, Cornelius Gurlitt’s ideal of a Pan-German state administered by Germany resounded throughout the movement. In Germany, chauvinism was at its height, with the most influential militaristic Prussian Junkers leading the way in building the Alldeutscher Verband, the Flottenverein (Naval League), and the Wehrverein (Defense League)—“gigantic organizations, extending over the whole empire, which were preparing her in accordance with a definite program for the ‘inevitable’ war for world supremacy.”13 An estimated two million people were members of these various associations in Europe, with another two million believed to be “overseas” members by 1913. The avowed purpose of these bodies was to deepen national pride and impel all Germans to recognize their responsibilities as a major world power abroad. For the Pan-Germanist, the state was absolved of any question of morals. All means justified the desired result.
To meet their aims, education needed to be controlled by a national policy. All tendencies to oppose nationalism must be suppressed, and all nationalistic and patriotic policies encouraged. To spread German influence and responsibility abroad, immigration to German colonies was actively encouraged. German financial special interests were furthered by energetic politics that led to practical results. It was the Pan-Germanists who coined the now well-worn terms “realpolitik,” “Weltpolitik,” “Anglo-Saxon Menace,” “Slavic Peril,” and “big business.”14
* * *
The purifying salt of Pan-Germanism and saber rattling of militarism were only two weapons in the kaiser’s arsenal for German domination of Europe. As Hildebrand Gurlitt would learn, German culture remained overshadowed internationally by the French, the British, and even the Italians, despite its own great musicians, artists, and literary figures. In the hands of Wilhelm II, it would become a lofty shield behind which all German-speaking peoples could rally. Hugo von Tschudi, once director of the Berlin Königliche National-Galerie, was exiled to the Bavarian State Collections by the kaiser, simply because he favored French modern art, including Picasso. Tschudi would not recover from offending the kaiser’s sense of German superiority.
Hitler, too, learned the political significance of culture and art from the kaiser. Art, that calm refuge whose cultural message was intended to connect all peoples, irrespective of their ethnic diversity, nationality, or social standing, was becoming a divisive political tool.
The arts, too, in exploring their own boundaries, were not immune from discord or the new isms. Impressionism, Postimpressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Progressivism, avant-gardism, and more dominated fine art, literature, and music, dividing thought and engendering argument. Each had its champions and its detractors.
Technology, too, bore down on the arts. Advances in photography and film challenged the artist to seek new worlds, new expressions, and new ideas to differentiate their craft from the photograph so they could continue to make a fresh impact on a rapidly changing cultural landscape. In music, the challenge was met at times with a trend toward the dissonant; or, conversely from traditionalists, a rejuvenated fluid melodiousness, redolent of rolling countryside that had remained unchanged for centuries. In literature, experimental philosophies and concepts abounded.
Industrialization had led to progress and advances beyond the comprehension of Hildebrand Gurlitt’s father’s and grandfather’s generations. Great tools and inventions unchained human energies, bringing the world into the machine age with extraordinary inventions like electricity, the automobile, and the internal-combustion engine. Productivity had increased fivefold in fifteen years. Improvements in hygiene slowed the death rate. Medicine was at long last a burgeoning science capable of cures. The result was an increase of one hundred million people in Europe alone—as much as the entire European population had been in 1650.15
In the United States, the large corporations that belonged to the men who built America—Vanderbilt, Morgan, Rockefeller, and Carnegie—soared to new profits. The value of Carnegie’s steel company grew from $6 million in 1896 to an astounding $40 million only four years later. Aluminum and other light alloys were developed, while the chemical industry created new processes and materials.
The “American system” of utilizing interchangeable parts became standard practice in all industrialized nations. Like steel, dynamite changed the face of the world, making possible mammoth excavations and epic construction projects like the Panama Canal and the Simplon Railway Tunnel through the Alps. In the thirty years from the initial marketing of dynamite, in 186
7, the manufacture grew from eleven tons to 66,500 tons.16
Yet nowhere was progress as cutting-edge as in the armaments industry. Dynamite’s success was turned toward military uses. Smokeless gunpowder, patented by dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel, made firing at the enemy from hidden locations a reality. The small-bore rifle, with improved trajectory and accuracy for shooting farther, came on the market, allowing warfare to take place from a distance. Automatic recoil for field guns, too, contributed to the streamlining and mechanization of warfare. Land and naval mines, torpedoes, and the future promise of the submarine gave military commanders reason to rejoice.
Each side could now kill the other without ever having to come close to the enemy. Even the czar recognized that it was impossible for Russia to catch up with technological advances, lamenting to his mother in a letter, “Many strange things happen in this world. One reads about them and shrugs one’s shoulders.”17
* * *
With colonies in North and South America, the Pacific, the entire Indian subcontinent, Africa and the Caribbean, Britain’s empire was the gold standard of its day. The British colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain spoke of “manifest destiny” as the key to empire and Britain’s right to defend itself against any and all newcomers. Yet, by then, the crippling arms race had changed the complexion of imperial defense.
The German Empire under Kaiser Wilhelm II set the pace in armaments production with an increase of 79 percent, closely followed by czarist Russia with 75 percent. Britain, by far the largest of the imperial nations, increased its armaments and armed services by 47 percent, and France by 43 percent. The result was that by 1914 the German and Russian empires were the dominant land powers in Europe, with the British Royal Navy feeling the severe threat posed by imperial Germany.18
Naturally, arms required men to use them, and the Germans became the first to use conscription. The German Navy League, a special-interest group headed by Admiral Tirpitz for German expansionism, had the necessary backing of the Ruhr industrialists and armaments manufacturers, and held a cherished link directly to the Naval Bureau in Berlin. Soon, all continental Europe followed the German example. Conscription was used in propaganda to show how life as a man-at-arms could improve health and extend life. It also had the added benefit of making the armed forces accept poor pay, regimentation, and absolute obedience.19
With all these reserves of firepower and men, wars needed to be fought to prove sovereignty over colonies and superiority against rival empires on land and sea. The kaiser had been working since the turn of the century to award Germany its just place as a leader among nations. As early as 1906, Count Alfred von Schlieffen, a German staff general, had finalized his plan for the conquest of France: it should take a mere six weeks and seven-eighths of Germany’s 1.5 million men under arms to defeat the French.
Yet the kaiser would need to swat away cousin Nicky’s Russia, too; protect Austria-Hungary’s interests; and break Britain’s hundred-year stranglehold on international diplomacy at the point of a gun.
5
WAR
If your own father came across with those from the other side you wouldn’t hesitate to hurl a hand-grenade straight at him!
—ERICH MARIA REMARQUE, All Quiet on the Western Front
Just before the guns of August 1914 were fired, Hildebrand spent those last halcyon days of July visiting Cornelia in Paris. He graduated with good grades from the Realgymnasium in Dresden, and was due to enroll at University of Frankfurt for the following September as an art student.1 At eighteen, he had grown a mustache and stood with impeccable posture. Though not tall, and seemingly rather thin, he was handsome, with deep-set brown eyes, brown hair, and an intelligent gaze. Cornelius and Marie Gurlitt had every reason to be proud of their two sons: Hildebrand’s older brother Wilibald graduated that same June from Leipzig University with his degree in music.
Cornelia was another matter altogether. In fact, the family was obliged to turn away from the accomplishments of the sons to focus instead on her. The task ahead was simply how to extricate Cornelia from Paris with the minimum of fuss, for rumor had it that she had tottered off the rails and become involved with a married man. As Hildebrand was always seen as the “little one” by Cornelia, everyone thought that a visit from him would be welcomed, where one from Wilibald might be seen as a threat to their sister’s newfound freedom. From Hildebrand’s perspective, his mission had the added benefit of letting him survey the active Paris art scene for himself.
Clearly, Cornelia had a rebellious streak and a dark side that concerned the family. Still, she had blossomed into a beautiful young woman. Her heart-shaped face and fine features belied the turmoil that brewed within. Deeply inspired by the works of the Bridge in Dresden, she’d decided to abandon her studies in 1909 against her parents’ wishes. Despite her father’s rather forceful suggestions that she become an academic, Cornelia—as obstinate as a mule refusing to be led—insisted that she had no intention of teaching art. Instead, she rather hoped to become an expressionist artist in her own right.2 Here was a woman determined to live her life as she saw fit, a most modern woman even by today’s standards, who would brook no opposition.
Like many artists, Cornelia felt her schooling did not prepare her for life as a painter. Armed with her firm resolve, she enrolled in Hans Nadler’s art school in Gröden in 1910, where she met her lifelong friend Lotte Wahle.* From Gröden, she continued her studies at Hittfeld, near Hamburg, and struck up what may have been something more than a platonic friendship with dashing Rolf Donandt, son of the mayor.
By 1913, Cornelia was in Paris, seemingly living her dream among her fellow artists, while sharing the bed of the married Moravian-born, Austrian expressionist painter Anton Kolig. Her lover attracted the interest of Gustav Klimt in 1911, and it was Klimt who arranged for Kolig’s travel scholarship to Paris.3 Remembered today for his nudes of both sexes, Kolig would later paint The Lament—a large oil of a reclining male nude in the foreground with a small male and female nude couple kneeling and facing each other in the background. It was dedicated to Cornelia by a banner with her name written clearly painted beneath the reclining man. “I don’t know how you lived and negotiated through those times of my affair with Cornelia,” Kolig wrote his wife afterward. “In all events I came home late to avoid seeing the pain I had inflicted on you … but how could I interfere with destiny?”4
What, if any, scenes erupted between Cornelia and Hildebrand when he was in Paris is anyone’s guess. Yet a clue to her frame of mind has been left behind in the form of a small portrait. Cornelia painted her brother on paper purchased from an artists’ dealer in Montparnasse, and in the image he appears almost Mephistophelian, with devilishly peaked eyebrows and a sinister smile. Nevertheless, whatever the personal dramas facing brother and sister, a far greater calamity loomed ahead.5
* * *
At precisely the same time as the Gurlitt siblings were embroiled in their discussions, the world around them was disintegrating apace. On Sunday, June 28, 1914, at 10:45 a.m. in Sarajevo, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, were assassinated, releasing the final brake on tensions between Austria-Hungary and the Kingdom of Serbia. Their assassin, Gavrilo Princip, aged only nineteen, was a member of the revolutionary organization Young Bosnia, which had been encouraged into action by the secret military society known unofficially as the Black Hand.
Although Franz Ferdinand’s relationship with his uncle the emperor was characterized by “raging thunder and lightning,” this final assassination in the twisted thread of assassinations stretching back some seventeen years was enough to create the irretrievable crisis that would lead to war. Franz Ferdinand was not particularly well liked, and was frequently described as not harboring an anatomical region called a heart. Still, Austria-Hungary demanded satisfaction like an aging duelist of the eighteenth century and planned to enfold Serbia into its midst just as it had done with Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908. Russia, though severely weakened by the arm
s race, was obliged to stand shoulder to shoulder with Serbia as the world’s foremost Slav power.6
“Within an hour or two of the tragedy becoming known, Budapest had changed to a city of mourning,” English governess Beatrice Kelsey wrote in her diary that fateful day. “All entertainment was canceled and black streamers and flags at half-mast appeared on public buildings. The few people in the streets moved quietly and spoke in hushed voices.”7
Wilhelmine Germany was prepared to embrace the moment. On July 5, the kaiser publicly pledged his “faithful support” to Emperor Franz Joseph should Austria-Hungary’s punitive action against Serbia roll out Russian guns. Thereafter, the headlong plunge into war was assured. Austria-Hungary delivered its ultimatum to Serbia on July 23 and rejected the Serbian response that came three days later. Yet, in a margin note on a copy of the Austrian ultimatum, Kaiser Wilhelm remarked that the conciliatory message from the Serbs “dissipates every reason for war.”8 All that remained was a last-ditch attempt to keep Britain neutral.
* * *
In Winston Churchill, the British prime minister Henry Herbert Asquith had a First Lord of the Admiralty with a real nose for battle. Churchill alone had a clear vision of the action that Britain should take. Consulting with the First Sea Lord, Prince Louis of Battenberg,* on that “very beautiful day” of July 26, Churchill gave the order that the fleet should not disperse after it completed its unrelated test mobilization maneuvers. He was determined “that the diplomatic situation should not get ahead of the naval situation and that the Grand Fleet would be in its War Station before Germany could know whether or not we should be in the war and therefore if possible before we had decided ourselves.”9
Equally significant, Churchill persuaded the prime minister to authorize the War Office and Admiralty to send a “warning telegram” to Germany to initiate an official precautionary period. This measure “invented by a genius … permitted certain measures to be taken on the ipse dixit of the Secretary of War without reference to the Cabinet … when time was the only thing that mattered.”10 The device was tailor-made for Asquith’s deeply divided cabinet of “Little Englanders” and battle-hardened warhorses.