Anglomania

by Ian Buruma

  Vicky fretted endlessly about her son’s condition, and the Anglo-German doctors’ rivalry flared up on several occasions. The British doctors thought that electric shock treatment was the thing, in ever-increasing doses. The German doctors preferred massages, braces, and baths in salt water, malt water, and regular immersions in the warm intestines of freshly killed hares—a sensation that gave little “Willy” intense pleasure. The Germans recommended the Baltic Sea for saltwater baths. Vicky insisted that English seawater at the Isle of Wight, supplemented with plain English food, would do far more good. Her will, as usual, prevailed.

  With extraordinary efforts—endlessly mounting and falling off his pony until he found his balance; hours of shooting practice with one arm, and so forth—Willy learned to cope with his impediment and was able to take part in the manly pursuits expected of a Prussian prince. Yet he never seemed able to come up to Vicky’s standards. How much she actually loved him is impossible to know, but she did expect him to be something he could never be—an earnest, liberal, scholarly Anglophile, a reincarnation of her father, Prince Albert—and made him feel inadequate as a result. She admitted the hopelessness of her desire in a letter to Queen Victoria (1864): “How often I try to trace a likeness to dear Papa in his dear little face, but as much as I wish it I cannot find it, but it may come perhaps—may he but remind me of him in mind and in heart and character.”

  Vicky tried her best to raise her children in “an English home.” She spoke English to them, hired an English nanny (Mrs. Hobbs), had an English nursery, with English nursemaids, and English cooks, who made English puddings. When Vicky said “we,” she meant “we British.” And when she took tea, it was English tea, taken in the drawing room. She dressed Willy up in an English sailor’s suit, and, on holidays at Balmoral, in a Scottish kilt. The sailor’s suit was especially important to her, since it represented a naval challenge to Prussian army worship. When he dressed up on his tenth birthday as a lieutenant of the Second Pomeranian Regiment and showed himself off to his mother, she declared that “poor Willy” looked like a little monkey standing on top of an organ. Not the kind of comment designed to boost his confidence.

  Vicky encouraged Willy’s passion for ships as much as she could, “as an antidote to the possibility of a too engrossing military passion—which of course is not to be desired.” Long after he had rejected everything his mother stood for, memories of early visits to Portsmouth, guided around by kindly aunts and British admirals, still brought tears to his eyes. He declared to a British audience, including his uncle Edward VII, that it was then that the “wish was born in me also to build such ships, also to possess a fleet one day as beautiful as the English.” This was only ten years before he helped to start World War I.

  Vicky made the most elementary parental mistake. By forcing her son to be one thing, she ensured he would be the opposite. Making an insecure German boy feel that his native country was always inferior to hers was bound to skew his sense of national loyalty. He might try to impress the British by wearing flashier uniforms, sporting bigger mustaches, or building a bigger navy than theirs, but he would still resent them, because he could never win enough respect; no matter how much the crowds in London applauded him (before 1914), no matter how many yacht races he won at Cowes, his mother’s England remained unassailable, an elusive model he could never live up to, a hated vision of paradise.

  And so Willy rebelled. The first sign that all was not well came when he was only four years old, in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor, during the no doubt overlong marriage ceremony of the Prince of Wales and Princess Alexandra. Willy was dressed in a tartan outfit, complete with a bejeweled Highland dirk. When the boredom became too much for him, he picked off a fat semiprecious stone (the cairngorm) from the hilt of his dirk and threw it at the altar. The duke of Connaught’s attempt to control the boy caused a tantrum: Willy waved his dirk about wildly and bit his uncle in the leg. Nonetheless, Queen Victoria still pronounced him “a clever, dear, good little child, the great favourite of my beloved Angel.”

  But even the queen no longer thought he was such a good little child when Wilhelm began to behave like the antithesis of his forced role model, Victoria’s beloved Angel, Prince Albert. Vicky and Fritz, known to their enemies in Berlin as the Anglo-Coburgs, couldn’t bear Bismarck and his anti-liberal regime. So Wilhelm began to hero-worship the Iron Chancellor. Vicky wished to prevent her boy from being raised in the stiff, Prussian tradition represented by his grandfather, Kaiser Wilhelm I, a hearty authoritarian who loved soldiering and had barely ever read a book. So Wilhelm began to hero-worship his grandfather too. He signed letters to Queen Victoria as “your dutiful grandson, William Prince of Prussia.” She thought this was excessively pompous.

  Even as his mother was accused in Germany of having “Anglicized” her husband and thus robbing him of his Prussian warrior spirit, like a British Delilah cutting her German Samson’s hair, Wilhelm was doing his best to be a super-Prussian. Away from home, he was happiest in the company of Prussian army officers, whose anti-liberal, anti-Semitic, and above all anti-British opinions must have had a satisfying ring of rebellion. Here, in the Potsdam barracks, dressed up in riding boots and fine uniforms, he was in the company of men, real men, German men, far away from domineering Englishwomen. The identification of Germany with masculinity and Britain (or indeed France) with feminine degeneracy colored the kaiser’s often confused political thoughts to the end of his life. Liberalism and “parliamentarism” were feminine. The French, he wrote in exile, were a feminine race because of their inbred love of parliamentary government. The Germans were masculine, because they needed leadership of the “purely, vertical masculine, monarchical” kind.

  The idea of the English aristocrat as effeminate was common in Germany. The limp-wristed English dandy appears, for example, in the many stories about Kaspar Hauser, the nineteenth-century wild boy who attracted the attention of the earl of Stanhope, a Wildean figure in a green silk suit. Oswald Spengler, among other German thinkers, believed that the vigor of Saxons and Celts had been dissipated ever since the effete Norman nobility crossed the Channel with William the Conqueror. One of the rumors that afforded Nazi leaders great merriment was that Winston Churchill, the English lord par excellence, dressed in silk underpants.

  Yet the effeminate English lords were not just figures of fun: they could also be sinister, threatening, rather like the lisping English villains in modern Hollywood films. The danger was almost sexual, as though Englishmen, or more to the point in the kaiser’s case, one Englishwoman, would corrupt one’s morals, sap one’s manhood, or even turn a full-blooded German man into a submissive woman. (The sexual threat coming, in anti-Semitic mythology, from Jews is another, though perhaps not unrelated subject.) More and more, in the kaiser’s brain, Vicky and her liberal English, philo-Semitic ideas were seen as a personal, as well as a national threat—the two were hard to disentangle. He sometimes cursed the English blood (what there was of it) running through his Prussian veins.

  Children from mixed marriages tend to go one of two ways. They can learn to blend in easily with both nationalities, switching from one to the other without wholly identifying with either, or they deliberately seek to identify with the nationality of one parent, almost to the exclusion of the other. Both courses involve an element of theater, of self-consciousness. The kaiser was a rare case in that he tried both, certainly in the earlier part of his life, but then became more and more aggressively German. In him, the theatrical aspect was extreme. In a way, he was an early victim of identity politics. If he—and indeed his nation—had adopted his mother’s liberalism, his dual national loyalties would have posed fewer problems. Once he began to see nationality in terms of blood, manhood, and Kultur, he was in trouble, for that rather precluded cosmopolitanism. Indeed, cosmopolitanism became an acute threat.

  Fritz finally inherited the throne in 1888, but the Anglophile, liberal reign for which his wife had prepared him was to last a mere ni
nety-eight days. The new kaiser had been unable to do anything much, liberal or otherwise, in that short time, for he had cancer of the throat. After he died, the Anglo-German doctors’ battle flared up once again. Wilhelm blamed his father’s death on the British Dr. Mackenzie, who had been reluctant to operate, and the “Jewish scoundrel,” Dr. Krause, who was unable to save the patient either. While her husband was still alive, albeit barely functional, Vicky refused to have her son appointed regent. Wilhelm wrote a furious letter to his friend Philipp Eulenburg, telling him that “the royal escutcheon” had been “besmirched and the Reich brought to ruin by the English princess who is my mother, that is the most horrible of all!”

  And yet, all his ranting against English doctors, effete parliamentarism, and British arrogance notwithstanding, the new kaiser could never quite get England out of his blood. It would always be the country whose respect he craved. Indeed, on Queen Victoria’s birthday in 1878, he still declared himself to “feel a thorough Englishman.” Windsor remained the model whose grandeur his Prussian court, despite all its overblown pomp, could somehow never match. When he married the rather dowdy but undoubtedly very German Princess Auguste Viktoria of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, he said that one could easily tell she wasn’t brought up in Windsor, but in prissy little Primkenau. His effort to impress his grandmother on her birthday summed up, with an almost touching pathos, Wilhelm’s ambivalence toward his mother’s country. He promised to send the queen a drawing he had done of the navy review held by Kaiser Wilhelm I off the coast of Travemünde. “Our ironclads” had been magnificent. He hoped the queen would like it.

  The problem was that the harder he tried, the more ridiculous he often appeared to the people he most wanted to impress. He insisted on being a colonel in chief of a Highland regiment, but the spectacle of the pompous German in trews struck Scots as comic. He fell into the trap of many sartorial Anglophiles: the obvious theatrical effort made him look more foreign. To the English eye, even in gaudy Edwardian times, Wilhelm’s affectations looked not just foreign, but louche—naturally, to many English eyes, they amounted to much the same thing. There is always something that gives the foreigner away. The correspondent of The Times who saw the kaiser in 1894 could not help noticing that he wore a bracelet on each wrist. Even as crass a figure as the earl of Lonsdale, a great friend of the kaiser’s, would not have gone that far.

  Wilhelm’s craving for British respect was embarrassing, but it could turn into something more menacing too. It was his sense of rejection that turned him from an anxious Anglophile to a ferocious Anglophobe—and back again. In fact, he was often both at the same time. Not only did Wilhelm, as kaiser, want a German navy as big and beautiful as the British one; he wanted the British, and especially his British relatives, to acknowledge the fact and respect him for it. He made a fetish of his various notions of British superiority, especially the navy, and tried to make them German, rather in the way Herder and Schlegel had Germanized Shakespeare.

  THERE WAS LITTLE strategic need for Germany to build up a large navy. Germany wasn’t threatened from the sea, and there was, in any case, little enthusiasm in Germany for an expensive navy. The Reichstag didn’t want to pay for it, and the landed gentry, whose business was agricultural, had no interest in it. Germany was not primarily a maritime nation. Indeed, the distinction between land and sea obsessed conservative German thinkers at least until 1945: Germany as the land of farming folk, rooted in their native Continental soil; Britain as the land of rootless traders, roaming the seas in search of financial gain. Britain needed a navy to protect its traders and expand their trade. Britain, you might say, saw the earth from the perspective of its oceans; the British island kingdom “became part of the sea, a ship, or rather, a fish.”

  The jurist Carl Schmitt wrote that in 1942. He is best known for his legalistic justification of Hitler’s rule, but he remained an essentially Wilhelminian thinker. The quoted sentence is from his fascinating little book Land and Sea (Land und Meer), which attempted to explain the rise and—he hoped—fall of the British Empire. The British, he said, who had ruled the seas, thought in terms of bases and sea lanes. “What other peoples regarded as their native soil and Heimat, was nothing more than a hinterland to the British.” That is why, in Schmitt’s view, the British associate the word “Continental” with backwardness. But Britain itself, as the island metropole of a maritime empire, is uprooted and deprived of a sense of native soil. It was no accident, in Schmitt’s mind, that the most romantically imperialist British prime minister of the nineteenth century was Benjamin Disraeli—“an elder of Zion” in Schmitt’s nice phrase. Schmitt, who was no friend of the Jews, had a picture of Disraeli hanging over his desk. Like the kaiser, he loathed and respected the British Empire in equal measure. Disraeli was his enemy, and in an odd, twisted way, his hero too. For he represented global power and, as a Jew, the tenacity of a race without a Heimat.

  There were, to be sure, German liberals who wanted to change Germany from being a nation of rooted peasants and Junkers into a maritime trading nation. In 1848, liberal parliamentarians in Frankfurt, who associated overseas trade with progress, suggested that Germany should build a navy. One of them made a speech pointing out that trading peoples developed the highest civilizations and the freest political institutions. The sea, he said, is always in flux. “It doesn’t allow stagnation, either in social, or political life.”

  The promise of trade turned out to be the most effective way of persuading liberals in the Reichstag to support the kaiser’s naval dreams. Opportunities for German industry were also why some German industrialists and businessmen, some of whom were Jewish, favored a form of liberal German imperialism. But trade had little to do with the kaiser’s own motives. The navy was for him something much more symbolic, a matter of pride, indeed of “identity”; it was his peculiar way of Anglicizing Germany. Britain was the greatest power in the world. The Royal Navy ruled, and so Germany should copy Britain and have its navy too. “All the long years of my reign,” he said, “my colleagues, the Monarchs of Europe, have paid no attention to what I have had to say. Soon, with my great Navy to endorse my words, they will be more respectful.”

  The remarkable thing about the kaiser’s “marineabsolutismus” is that he took a concept associated with liberal progress and cosmopolitanism and turned it into a symbol of Teutonic reaction. It took a peculiarly resentful Anglophile to carry this off. The man whom the kaiser chose to realize his naval dream could not have been better suited for the task: Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz was an Anglophile who sent his daughter to school in England. But Tirpitz was convinced that the British would stop sneering only when the Germans had a maritime force as big and strong as their own. Trade came into this only insofar as it was argued, over and over, that the British were jealous of German industry, and powerful German battleships were necessary to stop the British from keeping Germany down.

  To many British people, the Royal Navy was doubtless a source of national pride, one of those institutions that made patriotic hearts beat faster. But it was not as a nation-building or identity-boosting exercise that the navy was built. Some Britons may have fetishized the Royal Navy, but it did not start off that way. The kaiser’s navy, as well as other bizarre Anglicisms in his German Reich, did. In 1902, the kaiser visited London and explained his naval vision to the prime minister, Arthur Balfour. Britain was a self-contained island nation, he said. Its unity could be taken for granted. But Germany was a “mosaic” of former principalities that had not yet congealed into a whole. The navy was needed to unify the nation: “Commanded by the Kaiser alone, Germans from all the regions would come streaming towards this active example of the unity of the Reich.”

  Similar sentiments lay behind the desire for a German Empire. The late imperial enterprise would not only benefit German trade and provide land for German emigrants, but it would express, in Tirpitz’s rather odd phrase, “transatlantic Germanness.” Richard Wagner had similar ideas: German
colonialists would ennoble the world through the German spirit, unlike the English, to whom the empire was only “a tradesman’s till.” The German navy and empire, then, would serve as badges of tribal, or even racial nationhood. That the German empire might spread an idea of universal civilization, which was the French colonial mission, was abhorrent to the kaiser. In 1901 he told students at his alma mater in Bonn to cultivate the national idea and forget “airy-fairy cosmopolitan dreaming.” Old empires, he said, were undermined by “universalism.” The essence of the nation was “to define itself against other nations according to national character and its unique racial characteristics.”

  So how could this possibly be reconciled with the kaiser’s ties with Britain, which endured despite all his Teutonism? There was only one way, which was to follow Disraeli’s credo that race was all. Just as the romantic Shakespearomanes saw the English playwright as a Nordic genius, the kaiser stressed the racial affinity between his mother’s and his father’s nations. In 1902, he wrote a letter to Edward VII, stating this clearly. It should be mentioned that he had never got on with his uncle; he felt gauche in the presence of this Francophile bon viveur, and Edward found his nephew’s martial posturing ludicrous. But the kaiser wrote, in English: “I gladly reciprocate all you say about the relations of our two Countries and our personal ones; they are of the same blood, and they have the same creed, and they belong to the great Teutonic Race, which Heaven has intrusted with the culture of the world … that is I think grounds enough to keep the Peace and to foster mutual recognition and reciprocity in all what draws us together and to sink everything which could part us!”