Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires

by Justin C. Vovk

  Otto’s birth only enhanced Charles and Zita’s popularity. Their reputations for being down-to-earth, unaffected people spread across Austria. Archduchess Zita garnered particular acclaim for making an effort to learn every major language of the empire, beginning with the notoriously difficult Czech. During a state dinner at the Hofburg, she charmed the different delegations from across the empire by greeting each of them in their native languages. The elderly Franz Joseph used every excuse he could think of to be in her company, and even Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, enjoyed the company of this attractive, wholesome young family. Zita was only nineteen.

  The first home Zita and her family settled into in Vienna was Hetzendorf Castle, on the western edge of the city. Although it was still attractive with its Baroque architecture and its lush, verdant parklands, Hetzendorf was a far cry from the stateliness of the Hofburg and Schönbrunn, the two principal residences of the Habsburgs in Vienna. Situated on the western edge of the city, the Rococo-decorated Schönbrunn contained more than one thousand rooms. It was beloved by Habsburgs for centuries for its beautiful gardens, menagerie, orangery, and the Dutch Botanical Gardens. Schönbrunn may have been a pastoral Xanadu on the outskirts of the capital, but the Hofburg was the imperial family’s symbol of power and authority. Built in the heart of Vienna on what is now the Ringstrasse, the Hofburg was the Habsburgs’ main residence since the late thirteenth century. With its several thousand rooms and more than half a dozen wings, it easily dwarfed most other European palaces, putting it on par with Versailles or the Winter Palace.

  When it came time for Charles and Zita to take up permanent residence in Vienna, they did not allow the splendor of the imperial court to affect them. They continued to win over the people they met with their charm, kindness, and grace. One contemporary noted that, during Charles’s tour of duty in the provinces, “his boyish simplicity and the girlish charm of Archduchess Zita won all hearts, and when they left the Galician garrison to take up more responsibilities in Vienna – the Emperor Franz Josef fitted up for them the old castle of Hetzendorff near Schönbrunn – they had become the most popular of the younger members of the Imperial family.”672

  When Wilhelm I died in 1888, he left a throne that was consolidated and stable. The first emperor’s antithesis was his grandson. Since the day he ascended the throne, Emperor Wilhelm II was noted for his erratic decisions and questionable behavior. Dona was forced to watch him make one poor decision after another, usually in the realm of foreign policy. Wilhelm, who was widely known as the kaiser—the German word for emperor—had succeeded in damaging Germany’s relations with most of the world’s other major powers. Tensions between the empire and Britain escalated after Queen Victoria’s death and Edward VII’s accession. Wilhelm had resented his English uncle, who had been a much more popular monarch.

  Anglo-German relations did enjoy a brief resurrection when Wilhelm, Dona, and their daughter visited England in May 1911 for the unveiling of the now-iconic monument to Queen Victoria outside Buckingham Palace. After arriving at Sheerness on the evening of May 15 aboard the Hohenzollern II, the emperor, empress, and Sissy arrived in London the next day by train, where they were met at Victoria Station by George, Mary, and other members of the royal family. Mary’s direct connection with the various German royal families—and George’s amiability toward Wilhelm—ensured that the new king and queen enjoyed a more amicable, stable relationship with Wilhelm and Dona than had their predecessors. In the procession down Pall Mall to Buckingham Palace, Wilhelm, George, and the Prince of Wales rode in the first carriage, followed by the second carrying the queen, the empress, and their daughters Sissy and Mary. “Enormous crowds thronged the route from the railway station to the palace, and cheers greeted the party throughout the ride,” reported the New York Times.673 “The reception on the part of the English royal family and the people of London was cordial,” Wilhelm later wrote in his memoirs. This “cordial.… very magnificent” visit was the last one Wilhelm and Dona would ever make to Great Britain.674

  Despite this reprieve, the Prusso-German monarchy suffered further blows in the early years of the twentieth century, notably when Wilhelm II made an unannounced appearance in French-controlled Morocco. His hope was to escalate that people’s incendiary desire for independence from France. The escapade was a foreign policy debacle. France’s position in the region was strengthened. So too was Britain’s, who stood behind their republican ally.

  The second blow occurred in 1908 when an English officer named Colonel Edward Montagu-Stuart-Wortley published a series of private interviews with the emperor at Highcliffe Castle as a single article in the newspaper Daily Telegraph. An attempt to show Wilhelm as a lover of England, the article backfired, making it “the biggest and most damaging of the many media sensations of Wilhelm’s reign.”675 Wilhelm’s slightly deluded, unbalanced sense of humor came across as a personal insult to the British public. “You English,” he said, “are mad, mad, mad as March hares.”676 He then went on a diatribe describing an unending list of mostly fictitious selfless acts he supposedly performed on Britain’s behalf. With characteristic braggadocio, he also proclaimed that it had been himself personally who prevented France and Russia from siding against Britain in the unpopular, unsuccessful Boer War, a continuing sore spot in Britain’s cultural pride. The entire fiasco sparked a two-pronged response. In Britain, it was met with slightly amused ridicule. Wilhelm genuinely seemed somewhat of an Anglophile, and the newspaper Westminster Gazette described it as “well meant” but “embarrassing.”677 Lord Esher added that it was “amazing” that the emperor “thinks himself immortal and omnipotent.” The reaction in Germany was darker. German bitterness toward England had been rising for decades, and the Daily Telegraph article inflamed those feelings. The people resented their emperor’s admiration for his mother’s homeland. This was one area where Dona’s personal feelings made her very visibly more popular than her husband. Her strident Anglophobia reflected public sentiment in Germany, helping to cement her already-excessive popularity. The former German chancellor Bernhard von Bülow described the article as a “dynamite bomb … [full of] sad effusions, which could scarcely have been surpassed in tactless stupidity.” At the time, even Edward VII understood the damage Wilhelm was doing to his monarchy. “Of all the political gaffes which HIM [His Imperial Majesty] has made, this is the greatest,” he said.678

  The Daily Telegraph affair was a turning point in Wilhelm’s reign. Public opinion turned against him in a striking way. For the first time, people openly questioned his sanity. Theories began to arise trying to ascertain the cause of the emperor’s unbalanced personality. Some suggested it was overcompensation due to his physical shortcomings—during his perilous birth in 1859, in which his brain failed to receive oxygen for several minutes, his left arm was permanently damaged, rendering it useless to him for the rest of his life. Author Miranda Carter suggested that his erratic personality was possibly, though improvably, due to “those first few minutes without oxygen [which] may have caused brain damage. Willy grew up to be hyperactive and emotionally unstable; brain damage sustained at birth was a possible cause.”679 This hypothesis has since been supported by several other royal historians like Jerrold Packard in his book Victoria’s Daughters. After two days of intense deliberation, some members of the Reichstag and Bundesrat called for his abdication. The federal princes’ attitude devastated the emperor, but there was little love lost between himself and the Reichstag. As early as 1883, Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria remarked that Wilhelm “never speaks of the parliament except as ‘that pig sty’ or of the opposition deputies other than those ‘dogs who must be handled with a whip.’”680 The emperor’s general sentiments about Germany’s parliament were evidenced by the fact that he dissolved the Reichstag four times, in 1878, 1887, 1893, and 1906.

  With a semiunified parliamentary voice calling for his abdication, Wilhelm fell into an emotional crisis. On November 17, Chancellor von Bülow hurried to Potsd
am to meet with the emperor and empress. They awaited him on the terrace in front of the Neues Palais. As Bülow approached, Dona hurried to him first.

  “Be really kind and gentle with the Emperor,” she whispered in his ear. “He is quite broken up.”

  The next day, Wilhelm announced he was considering accepting the Reichstag’s call to abdicate. Frantic, Dona immediately sent for Bülow to find out whether or not he would pressure the emperor to abdicate. She received him on the ground floor at the Neues Palais, her eyes red from crying all night.

  “Must the Emperor abdicate?” she desperately asked the chancellor. “Do you wish him to abdicate?” He assured the empress he would not and that abdication would not be necessary because “the storm had begun to abate,” thanks to his efforts in the Reichstag.681

  The damage was already done. Overwhelmed, Wilhelm suffered a small nervous breakdown, collapsing on the floor of his office shortly after returning from a visit to Baden-Baden. One witness described the fifty-year-old emperor as being paralyzed by a “psychic [sic] and nervous depression.”682 In her diary, Dona wrote, “In November this year there arose very many difficult and serious political repercussions.… I went to Baden-Baden, found my husband very depressed and we returned to Potsdam together. Suffering from overwork and assailed by many mental conflicts at this, he fell ill.”683

  This was not the first time Wilhelm suffered a nervous breakdown. When Count Leo von Caprivi resigned as German chancellor in 1894, the “shock of his resignation seems to have triggered a nervous collapse lasting some two weeks.”684 His breakdown in 1908 seems to have lasted of similar duration. For approximately two weeks, Crown Prince Willy took over much of his father’s responsibilities. The person who brought Wilhelm back from the depths of hopelessness was his wife. Dona guided and counseled her husband, urging him not to abdicate too rashly. Although the emperor soon abandoned any plans to do so, his self-esteem took a permanent blow. The crown prince recalled that Wilhelm “had lost his hope, and felt himself to be deserted by everybody; he was broken down by the catastrophe which had snatched the ground from beneath his feet; his self-confidence and his trust were shattered.”685 He was never quite the same after 1908 and required more support than ever from his patient wife. It would also not be his last nervous breakdown.

  By the early 1910s, there was little doubt that the Prusso-German monarchy was struggling. Once the most fiercely monarchical people in Europe, the Germans—especially the Prussians—had become disillusioned not only with Wilhelm II but his sons and many others members of the royal family too. Dona and Sissy were exceptions. Muckraking newspapers in Berlin openly criticized the government’s antiquated system of taxes for weighing heavily on the average citizens and almost not at all on the aristocracy, rising food prices, and growing national debt thanks to Wilhelm’s exorbitant spending on the imperial navy. Between 1905 and 1913, some 2,226,000 workers went on strike “against the three-class franchise in Prussia.”686 In the hard-fought elections of 1912, the Far Left and the Catholic Center Party—both of which were polarized against the Hohenzollern monarchy—became the two largest parties in the Reichstag with a combined majority of 201 seats. Support for the Wilhelmine government was at an all-time low. Murmurs could be heard calling for an end to the reign of the Hohenzollerns.

  Wilhelm II had not only alienated political leaders but other royals as well. By the time King George V ascended the throne, none of the several dozen royal families that made up Germany’s upper strata wanted anything to do with the Hohenzollerns. Nicholas II’s aunt Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna, who was originally from Mecklenburg-Schwerin, expressed her contempt for Wilhelm II: “I am only a Mecklenburger on one point: in my hatred for the Emperor William. He represents what I have been taught from my childhood to detest the most—the tyranny of the Hohenzollerns. Yes, it is the Hohenzollerns who have perverted, demoralized, degraded and humiliated Germany and gradually destroyed all her elements of idealism and generosity, refinement and charity.”687 It was a similar story with foreign dynasties. Wilhelm offended the king of Italy by making crude jokes about his “extraordinarily small” physique.688 In 1910, he nearly caused an international incident by playfully slapping King Ferdinand of the Bulgarians on the buttocks in public, who then promptly left Berlin “white-hot with hatred.” He reportedly struck Grand Duke Vladimir of Russia across the back with a field marshal’s baton.689 Even Wilhelm’s extended family loathed him. The Greek royal family despised the German emperor, who had gone out of his way to make things difficult for Greece in its recent war with Turkey, even though the country’s future queen was his own sister Sophie. His cousins Tsarina Alexandra and Crown Princess Marie of Romania detested his arrogance, immaturity, and condescension.

  Some of these sentiments changed for the better in 1913 when Wilhelm and Dona’s daughter, Princess Victoria Louise (“Sissy”), became engaged to Prince Ernest Augustus of Hanover. The choice of the extravagantly wealthy prince from Hanover as a husband was a controversial one, given the years of enmity between the Hohenzollerns and the Hanovers. The conflict dated back decades to before the formation of the German Empire when Prussia annexed Hanover and deposed its king following the Austro-Prussian War. So when Sissy declared she wanted to marry the grandson of the last Hanoverian king, many hoped it would heal the rift between the two dynasties.

  For most of her life, Sissy was a contradiction who had caused her mother much consternation. Like her grandmother Vicky, she was quite intelligent. When Sissy was young, Dona once wrote in her diary that she “interests herself a great deal in political events.”690 She had inherited the empress’s statelier qualities—her dignity, carriage, and grace. She had also inherited an imperious, willful streak from her father. She was one of those “girls who think that they know everything better than their elders, and who, under the pretext of being romantic, sometimes sacrifice considerable advantages for the sake of asserting themselves in opposition to their elders.”691 As the youngest child in a family of seven—and the only girl at that—she knew she was the center of attention and took great pains to have the entire court revolve around her. According to Crown Prince Willy, she was “the only one of us who succeeded in her childhood in gaining a snug place” in the emperor’s heart.692 One of Wilhelm II’s biographers described her as the emperor’s little “sunshine princess.”693 But it was her flippant attitude that caused fights between mother and daughter. When it came to her daughter, the “Empress had many an anxious moment.” Dona “had very decided opinions on propriety,” and as a result, “she often felt sincerely alarmed at the extremely modern spirit which her daughter displayed.”694 Sissy took a measure of delight in causing havoc, especially with her pious mother. She found an eager ally in her sister-in-law Cecilie. Once, when the latest fashions from Paris had arrived, Dona decried the impropriety of the short, slit skirts the women were wearing. Within a few days, Sissy and Cecilie horrified the empress when they walked into a room wearing the tightest, shortest skirts they could find. Though at times frustrated by these qualities in her daughter, Dona nonetheless understood them well. The princess was the only girl in a household of boys, and she was spoiled by a father who made clear his preference for his daughter over his sons. She was also the only person in the family, including the empress, who could influence her father with great ease. When Sissy informed her parents that she wanted to marry Ernest Augustus, Dona was overjoyed—and relieved—that she was settling down to a life of her own.

  Victoria Louise and Ernest Augustus met in 1912 when the prince came to Berlin after his brother’s death in an automobile crash. The latter had been on his way to Denmark to attend the funeral of his uncle—King Frederick VIII—when his car skidded off the road near Nackel in Brandenburg. At the emperor’s insistence, his sons Willy and Eitel-Fritz were part of the honor guard that escorted the body to its final resting place. Ernest Augustus came to Berlin to meet with Wilhelm II and thank him for his gesture of sympathy in sending his sons. Dress
ed in his light-blue uniform of the Bavarian military, Ernest Augustus was invited to an audience with Dona, who was greatly impressed by him. “How nice it is to see a Bavarian uniform here,” she remarked. “It’s just like the one in which my father went to war in 1870.” The empress felt a certain affinity for Ernest Augustus and his family because—like her own—they had been dispossessed during Bismarck’s military expansion of Prussia. The greatest impression Ernest Augustus made was on Sissy, for whom it was “love at first sight.” He was equally smitten when he laid eyes on the emperor’s daughter. It took a number of months to overcome all the political issues—which were very similar to those faced by Dona when she married Wilhelm—and required the help of most of Sissy’s brothers and especially her sister-in-law Cecilie. When the betrothal finally became official, Dona was thrilled for her daughter. She wrote in her diary, “My child, her father, and I were radiantly happy.”695 After much deliberation, the wedding was set for May 1913.

  Planning the marriage of the only daughter and youngest child of the reigning German emperor was steeped in etiquette. “During those weeks we were beset the whole time by people,” Sissy later wrote, “particularly by the ladies-in-waiting and Court officials. Everyone wanted to give advice concerning the Princess’s wedding.”696 As the mother of the bride, it fell to Dona to shoulder the responsibility of planning all the arrangements, but the inundation of unsolicited suggestions, corrections, and opinions was almost too much for the empress to bear. Ernest Augustus had great sympathy for her situation, both as a mother and a reigning consort. Before the wedding, he wrote the following to Sissy: