In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

by Geert Mak

  Simple curiosity was what brought Emily Davison into contact with these suffragettes: she had read strange newspaper reports about gatherings of radical women, and she wanted to see them with her own eyes. Before long she had joined their ranks. When a mass demonstration was held on 21 June, 1908, Emily was one of the most enthusiastic organisers.

  It is not clear what drove her; we can only guess. What is clear is that she was drawn into a current of political action, demonstrations of solidarity and intense friendships. Rage was not her sole motive. She was deeply convinced, as her female biographer wrote, that ‘she had been called by God not only to work, but also to fight for the cause she had embraced, like a Joan of Arc leading the French Army. Her prayers were always long, and the Bible always lay beside her bed.’ Emily united in herself the contradictions of her day; a hotchpotch of modern militancy and religious romanticism.

  She went further and further for the sake of the cause. On 20 March, 1909, a delegation of women who had demanded to speak to Prime Minister Herbert Asquith were arrested heavy-handedly. Emily was among them. She spent a month in jail. On 30 July she was arrested again for disrupting one of Lloyd George's political rallies. The suffragettes detested the Liberal leader, probably because he resembled them more closely than the rest. Lloyd George, who had started off as a poor laywer in Wales, was a reckless man and a skilled manipulator, a passionate opponent of the Conservatives, a man bound and determined to break England wide open with major social reforms. This time, Emily Davison was sentenced to two months.

  She became one of the first to wield the new weapon of the powerless: the hunger strike.‘When they locked me in the cell, I smashed seventeen windows right away,’ she wrote to a friend afterwards. ‘Then they threw me into another cell, where everything was bolted down … Then the real gnawing began. I fasted for 124 hours, and they set me free. I lost nineteen pounds and a great deal of muscle. I suppose you're in Switzerland now? Send me some picture postcards.’ On the wall of her cell she had scrawled the following text: ‘Rebellion against tyranny is obedience to God. Emily.’

  After that she was arrested again and again, went on hunger strike once more, was force-fed through a tube and finally attempted to throw herself down the prison stairwell. ‘My idea was, one great tragedy can prevent many more. But the safety net prevented serious injury.’

  Emily's story was not the only one of its kind. Although most of those in the women's movement did their best to remain calm and as rational as possible, in order to break through the image of the ‘emotional’ female who was unfit ‘by nature’ for business and politics, another part of that movement radicalised in a way that had never been seen before. In the Suffragette of 26 December, 1913, I stumbled upon a list of the major polit-actions of that year, 130 in total. The following is a random selection, taken from only a single month:

  2 April: arson at a church in Hampstead Garden; 4 April: a house in Chorley Wood destroyed by fire, a bomb attack at Oxted station, an empty train destroyed by an explosion in Devonport, famous paintings damaged in Manchester; 8 April: an explosion in the grounds of Dudley Castle; a bomb found on the crowded Kingston train; 11 April: a cricket pavilion destroyed in Tunbridge Wells; 12 April: arson at public schools in Gateshead; 19 April: an attempt to sabotage the famous lighthouse at Eddystone; 20 April: an attempt to blow up the offices of the York Herald; 26 April: a rail carriage in Teddington destroyed by fire.

  They were gradually becoming highly organised female guerrillas. But after the outbreak of the First World War, it suddenly stopped. The women ceased their attacks, and the government released all female militants. Had things gone differently, how would it have all turned out?

  I was reminded of a doll's house I had seen at the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood, showing the home of the Loebe family in Kilburn, the whole Edwardian female universe in a nutshell: the bedroom, the busy nursery, the bathroom, the parlour with its grand piano and conservatory, the full dining room with carpets, cupboards, mirrors and knickknacks, the kitchen with a fish on the table and two cats prowling below, everything reduced to a scale of 1:10.

  In that Edwardian world, a family dwelling of this type was the ultimate symbol of the sheltered environment, regularity and eternal routine. Emily and her companions in arms rejected that, and their behaviour may better reflect what was actually happening in the country than all the doll's houses put together. Around 1900, Great Britain was much more modern than the British people themselves wished to admit. All the traditions – the bowler hats, the gentlemen's clubs and burnished walnut institutions – could not hide the fact that the City was filling with female personnel, that women were at work everywhere in the field of education, that class distinctions were fading and that feudal gentility could not be combined with the equality of modern citizens. The empire's sober, macho values, in other words, collided head-on with the increasing priority given to care, consumption, democracy and women's rights.

  Beneath the surface, from 1900–14, the England of the broad middle classes lacked the manifest cohesion of that doll's house, the inner calm of the cathedral. In the words of Jose Harris it was, in fact, ‘a chaotic and amorphous society, characterised by countless contradictory trends and opinions, and well capable of flying completely off the handle.’ It was, to put it differently, a society in which people at all stages of historical development lived side by side: modern commuters beside villagers who scraped together a living in exactly the same way that their grandparents and great-grandparents had done; Victorian patriarchs beside female academics; colonial conquistadors beside liberal ministers.

  Within this field of contradictions, and driven by her own religious fervour, Emily Davison went further and further adrift. Slowly but surely, she began considering herself a martyr, a sacrificial lamb. On Tuesday 3 June, 1913 she was a free woman once more. She walked around at the ‘All in a Garden’ fair organised by the women's movement, and paused for a long time before the statue of Joan of Arc. She told her friends cheerfully that she would come back here every day,‘except for tomorrow. Tomorrow I'm going to the Derby.’ She refused to elaborate. ‘Read the papers, you'll see.’ The next morning she rushed into the main office. ‘I need to borrow two flags.’ In everything now, she was Joan of Arc.

  But dying was not a part of her plan. When she committed her ultimate act, the train ticket home, third class, was still in her pocket.

  Chapter FOUR

  Berlin

  DOORN CASTLE, IN THE HILLS EAST OF THE DUTCH CITY OF UTRECHT, contains everything there is to say about Kaiser Wilhelm II. Five locomotives, pulling a total of ninety-five freight cars, had carried the last of the imperial attributes to the Netherlands in winter 1919, and there they remain to this day, huddled together in less than two dozen mediumsized rooms and a large attic.

  Wilhelm's world contained, among other things, paintings of Frederick the Great, portraits of himself, walls full of battles and parades, tapestries that had belonged to Marie-Antoinette, 600 uniforms – most of which he had designed himself – the special fork which allowed the kaiser, lame in one arm, to cut his own food, a ‘Garven Laufgewichtswaage 200 kg’, two reinforced dining-room chairs guaranteed not to collapse under the weight of the emperor or his spouse, cabinets full of cigarette cases and snuffboxes, a heavy leather chair with built-in lectern for ease of discourse, a gold-embossed ‘Patent Water Flush Chamber’ toilet pot, twelve special hot-chocolate cups, an Unser Kaiserpaar album with a decorative silver binding, a drawing of the 1913 wedding banquet of the emperor's daughter, Victoria Louise, in which all of Europe's major sovereigns are seen sitting merrily together at the table and, lest we forget, a conjugal bed four metres square.

  In addition to his palace at Potsdam and his immense yacht the Hohenzollern, the kaiser possessed at the height of his power some thirty castles and estates all over Germany. He visited a third of them each year, sometimes for no more than a weekend. There was nothing he loved more than to speed through the countrysid
e at night in his own creamy-white train with gold trimmings. During the hunting season he would sometimes kill more than a thousand animals in a single week. Whenever he graced a military manoeuvre with his imperial presence, every unit of his own army had to win – which did not always suit the purpose of the manoeuvre. The Hohenzollern – with 350 crew members and space for 80 guests – was kept in readiness for him to board at any moment. In Europe he was known as the ‘showman of the continent’, the ‘crown megalomaniac’, the man who ‘wanted every day to be his birthday’.

  After his fall, and Germany's defeat in 1918, all he had left was this park estate at Doorn with the stiff, white villa at its heart. He ruled over his own life with military precision: prayers at 9.00, newspapers at 9.15, chopping wood at 10.30, correspondence at 12.00, lunch at 1.00, nap from 2.00 to 4.00, working and reading from 4.00 to 8.00, then dinner. In the grass near the villa I happened upon the graves of his three dogs: Arno, Topsy and ‘the faithful Santos, 1907–27. Begleitete Seine Majestät im Weltkriege 1914 — 18’.

  His grandson told me that, after the German defeat and his abdication, Wilhelm was a mental wreck. But he was also furious. He lectured endlessly to his visitors, and in 1919 was even heard to say: ‘God's wrath will be terrible. Such general treason on the part of a people against its ruler has no precedent in world history.’ The dream of seizing the throne once more continued to prowl the house, usually set in motion by Wilhelm's new wife, the young Princess Hermine, a stalwart lady who had moved in at Doorn soon after the death of the old empress. On Christmas Day 1931, Sigurd von Illsemann, an aides-de-camp, wrote in his diary: ‘All one has heard here at Doorn for months is the story of how the National Socialists will restore the kaiser to the throne; all hope, all thought, every utterance and all writing stems from this conviction.’

  During his exile, Wilhelm stopped throwing parties. Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands never once deigned to meet him. She had, people said, no desire to consort with rulers who abandoned land and army after hitting upon hard times. But Wilhelm's memoirs betray no shred of guilt. He still saw himself as the German emperor. He read everything he could about politics and psychology, and preached to his visitors, but he himself was incapable of extracting any learning from the knowledge and experience of others. He would simply change the facts to make them fit the world of his imagination.

  Yet he was not the ogre people for so long supposed him to be, the man who had purposely paved the way for a pan-European war. He had been more of a magician's apprentice, haplessly unable to get the genie back in the bottle. Or, in the words of Winston Churchill, a ‘careless tourist [who] had flung down his burning cigarette in the ante-room of the magazine Europe had become’, then went sailing on his yacht, and upon his return found ‘the building impenetrable with smoke … His undeniable cleverness and versatility, his personal grace and vivacity, only aggravated his dangers by concealing his inadequacy,’ Churchill wrote. ‘But underneath all this posing and its trappings, was a very ordinary, vain, but on the whole well-meaning man, hoping to pass himself off as a second Frederick the Great.’

  Doorn and Berlin lay a universe apart, yet turn-of-the-century Berlin was nonetheless a reflection of that attitude towards life expressed in the packed salons at Doorn.

  According to Berlin für Kenner, a German Baedeker published in 1900, Berlin was ‘the most glorious city in the world … the seat of the German kaiser and the king of Prussia’, with a ‘garrison of 23,000 men’, ‘as numerous as the railway ties between Frankfurt and Berlin’, while the population had a combined balance of ‘362 million in savings in the bank’.

  At the same time, Berlin was and is a city that lurches back and forth as it moves through time, like a runaway train compartment on the Ringbahn. Midway through the twentieth century, in the 1950s, an elderly citizen of Berlin could have told you about the sleepy nineteenth century provincial city of his childhood, the imperial Berlin of his youth, the starving Berlin of 1915, the wild and roaring Berlin of the mid-1920s, the Nazi Berlin of his children, the ravaged Berlin of 1945 and the reconstructed, divided Berlin of his grandchildren. All one and the same city, all within the space of one lifetime.

  Within that period, there was half a century, from 1871 to 1918, during which Berlin bore the title of ‘imperial capital’. Standing on the banks of the Oder, fifty kilometres outside Berlin, one found oneself at the geographic centre of the German Empire, 600 kilometres from Aken and 800 kilometres from Königsberg, the present-day Kaliningrad. Today that spot is marked by a Polish border post.

  Berlin was the parvenu of Europe, but the city – with the frenetic energy of all newcomers – did everything it could to make up for its lagging behind London, Paris and Rome. Even today some of the neigh-bourhoods resemble a febrile European dream: a Jugendstil villa here, something a bit Venetian there, beside it a bit of Paris or Munich, with styles and shapes filched from all over the continent. The myth of Berlin was fabricated as well: supposedly, the city had started out as a Germanic settlement, with the bear as its symbol and eponym. In actual fact, however, for the first 600 years of its existence Berlin was a purely Slavic village. Its name has nothing to do with bears, but with the Slavic word brl, meaning ‘swamp’. The actual connotation is something along the lines of ‘Swampy Place’, in Old Polish. Yet that, of course, is hardly the stuff of which a Great German historical tradition can be made.

  I had come to Berlin aboard the TGV and the ICE, travelling at 300kph past the villages of northern France, past cows with dungy backsides, a woman hanging the laundry, a pensive hare in a bare field.

  Next came the broad, stern German lowlands. We were cruising at 200 kph now. The passengers in the first-class compartment spoke only to their mobiles: ‘Yeah, put my name on that EP.’ ‘Take a look at whether that Fassinger order is already on the net.’

  After Wuppertal, a group of skinheads settled in on the platform between compartments. They sat there smoking and drinking beer, occasionally breaking into raucous laughter and loud belching. Beans, goulash soup and potatoes with sausage were being served in the club car. The first-class passengers ate in silence. The skinheads and the restaurant personnel were the only ones who spoke. ‘Shit!’ the boys kept yelling at each other, ‘Shit! Shit!’ It was a grey day, an unremitting greyish-green, all the way from Paris to Berlin.

  Now, from my room, I look out on a courtyard full of brown leaves, a part of the earth where no one ever walks, sits or plays, occupied only by a large tree grasping for light. Darkness is falling. There is snow in the air. The windows across the way are dark, except for one warm, yellow rectangle, behind which someone is writing at a table.

  These are lovely, private surroundings, excellent for getting some work done on my dispatches or doing a little background reading. For days I have been immersed in the diary of Käthe Kollwitz: sculptress and cartoonist for the satirical weekly Simplicissimus; wife of the social democrat general practitioner Karl Kollwitz; mother of two sons, Hans and Peter. A vivacious woman who was gradually tethered to earth by life at respectable Weissenburger Strasse 25. Here, to quote a few of her entries, is how she saw Berlin at the time:

  8 September, 1909

  Went with Peter to Tempelhof airfield yesterday. Wright flew for fifty-two minutes. He looked handsome, and seemed sure of himself. Once Wright had flown by, a little boy asked: ‘Is he real? I thought he was glued to it.’ The North Pole was discovered by both Cook and Peary.

  30 November, 1909

  With Karl and Hans to the third Sombart reading, which was about whether there was such a thing as a Jewish essence, and if so what that might be … He talked about ghetto Jews and non-ghetto Jews. Why are the Spanish Jews, who are of pure Semitic origin, not ghetto Jews? Can't they be forced into that? In any case, they are more handsome and walk more erectly than ghetto Jews.

  5 February, 1911

  At [SDP leader Paul] Singer's funeral, the entire fourth borough walked in front of the coffin. The procession laste
d more than an hour before the hearses passed. After a while, the appearance of the crowd made me sad. So many undereducated people. So many mean, stupid faces. So many ill and malformed. Yet still, as social democrats, they represented a favourable cross section of the population.

  16 April, 1912

  The British steamer Titantic has sunk, with more than a thousand people on board. Soost, the workman, earns twenty-eight marks a week, six of which go to pay the rent, twenty-two he hands over to his wife. She has to pay for beds and sleeping space, leaving fourteen or fifteen marks for Soost, his wife and their six children to live on.

  Their youngest is one month old … One of the older children is mentally retarded. Soost's wife is thirty-five, and she's already borne nine children, three of whom died. But all of them, she says, were as sturdy as this little boy at birth, they only weakened and died because she couldn't breastfeed them; she had no milk because she had to perform hard labour and couldn't care for herself.

  October 1912

  A Polygamy Bond has been set up in Jena. A hundred superior specimens of manhood desire intercourse with 1,000 superior specimens of womanhood, for the purposes of propagation. As soon as the woman becomes pregnant, the conjugal bonds are dissolved. All this with a view to racial advancement.

  New Year's Eve, 1913