Royal Babylon (15 page)

With Wilhelm's withered arm came an emperor-sized chip on his shoulder. He spent a lifetime trying to compensate for his physical disability and his feelings of personal inadequacy. He endured horrific orthopedic cures during his boyhood, including electric-shock treatment. At the age of four he was strapped into a macabre contraption comprising leather belts and steel bolts in an attempt to realign his spine. Inevitably these childhood experiences left an unfortunate and permanent mark on his personality. In later years he let it be known that he always slept with a cocked, loaded pistol in a bedside drawer, just to show how tough he was. He always made a point of sitting on a hard chair even if there was a soft one available. He deliberately wore the stones on his many diamond and sapphire rings facing inward so that they hurt people when they shook his hand. The Kaiser was also pathologically narcissistic. He preened, strutted and swaggered, handing out photographs of himself to his friends, always taking care not to show the stunted little arm which barely reached his left jacket pocket. His swept-up mustache was back-combed and pomaded every day by a court barber. He wore so many medals that his chest was described as a declaration of war.

Wilhelm's wife was Princess Auguste Viktoria of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg. The Kaiser called her Dona to save time; Bismarck preferred to call her “the cow from Holstein.” The Empress was a deeply religious woman of the
fiercely evangelical variety, and her handpicked ladies-in-waiting were known as the “Hellelujah Aunts.” In appearance, the Empress was drab and unfashionable, defying the best efforts of the finest dressmakers in Germany to make her look regal. She was also quite slow on the uptake, a fact that she advertised with a glassy-eyed expression which never left her. In 1889 the Kaiser and his wife paid a state visit to Constantinople, where they found the Sultan eager to treat them on a lavish scale. When the Empress visited the harem, she was introduced to the chief eunuch, the Kislar Aga. It was explained to the Empress that the Kislar Aga's position made him one of the most important people in Turkey. The Empress nodded intently, then asked him if his father had also been a eunuch.

The Kaiser endured the ultimate in royal mother-in-law-from-hell experience. The half-mad Dowager Adelaide, wife of the late Duke Frederick of Schleswig-Holstein, had an obsession with personal hygiene. She evolved a system of washing that involved dividing her body into twenty-four washable sections, or “hemispheres.” Each section required an individual but complete set of bowl, pitcher, soap dish, soap and towel. This eccentric routine tended to have a ruinous effect on the domestic arrangements of her hosts and the patience of her son-in-law. Slightly more embarrassing was the predatory old Dowager's imprudent behavior with young men. At two state dinners she made sudden assaults upon her male neighbors at table. When she was strategically positioned out of harm's way between her daughter and a lady-in-waiting she became violent and abusive.

If there was one thing that nineteenth-century monarchs loved, it was dressing up. For the Kaiser and his cousins abroad there was nothing quite as exciting as slipping into somebody
else's army uniform. Whenever a Spanish king visited England, for example, the guest would invariably arrive dressed as a British general, and he would be greeted by a British king dressed as a Spanish admiral. The Kaiser's cousin King George V was the arch royal cross-dresser. King George always let it be known that he hated Germans and was very upset by suggestions that he too was transparently German, but nothing could stop him from posing for the camera dressed up in a Prussian general's uniform.

From Frederick William I onward the Hohenzollerns were military-uniform fetishists, but there was none more fanatical than Kaiser Wilhelm II. The Kaiser had more uniforms than Liberace had stage costumes, over 400 of them, stashed away in his mahogany wardrobes, although not one single dressing gown (dressing gowns were for wimps: apparently his grandfather Wilhelm I had once refused a silk robe, growling “Hohenzollerns wear no dressing gowns”). In the first seventeen years of his reign the Kaiser redesigned the uniforms of his German army officers thirty-seven times. He had a squad of tailors in his palace on permanent standby. There were uniforms for every occasion: uniforms for attending galas, uniforms to greet every one of his regiments, uniforms with which to greet other uniforms, uniforms for eating out, “informal” uniforms for staying in. It was joked that he had an admiral's uniform that he only ever wore to see performances of
The Flying Dutchman
. When he attended military parades there was little danger of mistaking the Kaiser among all the other brightly uniformed Prussian automatons: he was the only one wearing a solid gold helmet.

Kaiser Wilhelm II had a fetish for women's arms. His seduction technique involved engaging a woman in conversation,
slowly peeling off her long gloves, then passionately kissing her arms from fingertips to elbow. Women who cooperated with the Kaiser's eccentric foreplay strategy were richly rewarded with gifts of jewelry. Not all of them kept silent about their close encounters of the mustachioed kind, however, because the Kaiser's little foible was widely known and laughed about.

Wilhelm did in fact share just one characteristic with his hero, Frederick the Great, although it wasn't one that he cared to acknowledge. Frederick surrounded himself with men and wrote semierotic love letters to his friend Voltaire. An English ambassador in Prussia wrote home: “No female is allowed to approach this court—males wash the linen, nurse the children, make and unmake the beds.” Voltaire claimed that in his later years Frederick had homosexual affairs with his soldiers. His first male lover may have been his close friend, the army lieutenant Hans von Katte.

In the Kaiser's militarily dominated, ultra-chauvinist Second Reich, a Prussian soldier's life was built around male bonding and the Spartan ideal of soldierly companionship. Women were generally considered to be useful for breeding, cooking and polishing a chap's spurs: for real friendship, one looked to one's fellow officers. These were not necessarily homosexual friendships, but the culture was undeniably homoerotic. Wilhelm had grown up to be very much a part of this masculine society. However, he was probably looking for something more than a few steins of lager and the smell of new lederhosen while hanging out with the boys from the Gardes du Corps.

The Bulgarian Czar Ferdinand was one of the first royals abroad to discover, to his annoyance, that the Kaiser had a habit of slapping men on the bottom. Many a young officer had his
bottom patted or his cheeks tweaked by the Kaiser. Wilhelm formed his own quasi-secret society, known as the White Stag Dining Club: to gain admission everyone had to kneel over a chair, tell a blue joke, then have his bottom smacked by the Kaiser with the flat of his sword.

Berlin was rocked by a series of homosexual scandals, collectively known as “the Eulenburg Affair,” which exposed a large homosexual network involving men who were friends, relatives or employees of the Kaiser. Sodomy was still a serious criminal offense in Germany and carried a long prison sentence. The Military Commander of Berlin, Count Kuno von Moltke, was revealed as the homosexual lover of Wilhelm's best friend, a young diplomat called Prince “Phili” Eulenburg. Wilhelm and the Prince were inseparable. Eulenburg was also blackmailed by the proprietor of a Viennese bathing establishment—one which incidentally was also frequented by the Austrian Emperor Franz Josef's homosexual younger brother Ludwig. Inconveniently, another of the Kaiser's military chiefs, Count von Huelsen-Haeseler, dropped dead in the Kaiser's presence, dressed in a tutu in the middle of a drag act.

Meanwhile, the Potsdam garrison was hit by several court-martials for sodomy and a number of suicides. In court, the regimental tight white breeches and thigh-length boots were noted to be particularly provocative. Another close friend of the Kaiser was the incredibly rich industrialist Alfred von Krupp, whose reputation was also destroyed by a vice scandal. Italian police had raided his Capri holiday home and found Krupp and a gang of his German friends sodomizing a string of young boys. Krupp also stood accused of importing a selection of young Italian waiters to the Hotel Bristol in Berlin for the purpose of staging
homosexual orgies. The evidence was damning and overwhelming, and Krupp committed—although some believe faked—suicide. There were unconfirmed sightings of him years later in the United States, the Far East and in South America.

So suspicion inevitably fell on the Kaiser himself, but he was never directly implicated. He personally scanned the papers and threatened to blow out the brains of any editor who dared make too much of his association with homosexuals. Whenever any of the Kaiser's friends got into trouble he quickly dropped them, once issuing a statement that his former friends, including his dearest friend Eulenburg, were “perverts” and that an example should be made of all of them.

The Kaiser sincerely believed that he was guided by God, his speeches always invoking the Almighty's wrath for this or that. He was one of the last monarchs to claim that he ruled by Divine Right, a concept abandoned by his royal cousins in England more than 200 years earlier. “We Hohenzollerns,” he proclaimed in one of his more excitable moments, “are the bailiffs of God.” The Kaiser overstepped the borderline between the usual delusions of the royal self-obsessed and genuine mental illness. During his lifetime he was known to be emotionally unstable and to have suffered from severe personality problems. Frequent gibes were made throughout World War I about the Kaiser's disturbed state of mind, but there was an ironic truth behind the obviously crude anti-German propaganda.

In Berlin the Kaiser had thirty-two huge statues erected, each depicting one of his illustrious Brandenburg ancestors. One of the glorious ancestors immortalized in white marble was Otto the Idle, a man who never actually set foot in the land he ruled and once even tried to sell it. Unsurprisingly,
Wilhelm's Avenue of Victory was openly derided by Berliners. For most of the time, the pantomime Emperor was oblivious to the sneers which accompanied his bombastic posturing because he lived in a bubble of perpetual adulation, cocooned by groveling courtiers and generals. Those nearest to Wilhelm knew that it was wiser to bow and kiss his gloved hand than to sneer, because the Kaiser was insanely sensitive to criticism. When two small boys were overheard saying that their father had called the Kaiser a “windbag,” Wilhelm had the father arrested and imprisoned for two years.

In the art of statesmanship, the Kaiser was a disaster without equal. Abroad he was prone to wild, aggressive outbursts about militarism and German world domination; his public speeches at home were similarly tactless. He once assured a group of striking workers at the Krupp Works that if they had anything whatsoever to do with the Social Democratic Party he would have them all shot. This speech was wildly applauded by his groveling entourage.

Unlike his idol, Frederick the Great, this Hohenzollern warrior king was a coward. He wasn't personally responsible for starting the conflict in 1914, and the initial outbreak of hostilities left him paralyzed with fear. Throughout World War I his friends observed that the Kaiser appeared to be perpetually on the brink of a nervous breakdown. When it started to go wrong he became so panic-stricken that his doctors feared for his sanity.

The Kaiser passed on some of his more disturbing personality traits to his children. He had six sons and one daughter, the very spoiled and very odd Princess Victoria Louise. Wilhelm bought her a piglet, freshly scrubbed with a blue bow tied in its tail. The Princess grew fond of her pet. Her
governess, in the certain knowledge that it could only end in tears, dreaded the inevitable beckoning of pork heaven. When the pet grew up, however, the Princess simply sold it to a butcher, pocketed the money, then sat down to enjoy a sausage supper.

The eldest son and heir, Crown Prince William, was blessed with even fewer social skills than his father. When the Kaiser and William were shooting game together in England, the Prince heard one of their English hosts yell out, “For God's sake, don't shoot the Kaiser—his son is worse yet!” In 1918 when Wilhelm was forced to abdicate and flee to Holland, everyone insisted that his son renounce his rights to succession at the same time. The Crown Prince was eventually allowed to return to Germany in 1923, where he enjoyed a few years of fast living before signing up for the Nazi Party in 1932. In the years that followed, he and two of his brothers lent support to the Nazis by their presence at rallies. Two of Crown Prince William's sons also joined the Nazi party.

The German royal family had a lot more in common with the Nazis than their patriarch would care to admit. The ex-Kaiser's position on the subject of Hitler was ambivalent. Wilhelm was always quick to publicly condemn the rise of Nazism, but he was also quick to send Hitler a congratulatory telegram when he occupied Paris—a gaffe that ruined twenty-one years of hitherto dignified silence in exile.

The German aristocracy played a very important role in the early rise of the Nazi party—many German nobles made their contempt of Hitler clear only when it was politically correct to do so. In the early 1930s the former grandees of the Second Reich were willing to do anything Hitler told them provided it would stop the tide of socialism. The Kaiser's
professed personal dislike of Hitler had more to do with class snobbery and his Hohenzollern dislike for democrats. There was very little in the Nazi manifesto that he could have personally objected to—the distinction between Nazi racial theories and the German monarchy's obsession with royal purity was a very fine one. The notion of the “Aryan race” was first floated during the reign of the Kaiser's great-uncle, and it was in imperial Germany that the more truculent form of nationalism, or “blood and soil,” first took root. The Kaiser was also a rabid anti-Semite, although he was happy to associate with very wealthy Jews. He had a statue of Heine pulled down because he was a Jewish socialist. In 1918 the Kaiser slunk off to retirement at Doorn, blaming World War I on a conspiracy of “international Jewry.” His home became a pilgrimage for Nazi officers who were stationed in Holland.