Herbert Eulenberg - The Hohenzollerns

Volume 10

THE HOHENZOLLERNS

HERBERT EULENBERG
TRANSLATED BY M. M. BOZMAN

First published in Great Britain in 1929 by George Allen & Unwin Ltd

This edition first published in 2020
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1929 English Translation George Allen & Unwin Ltd

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-367-02813-8 (Set)
ISBN: 978-0-429-27806-8 (Set) (ebk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-23121-7 (Volume 10) (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-27901-0 (Volume 10) (ebk)

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The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

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HERBERT EULENBERG

TRANSLATED BY

M. M. BOZMAN

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
UNWIN BROTHERS, LTD., WOKING

FIRST PUBLISHED IN GREAT BRITAIN 1929

IT would be a shabby, not to say a dastardly, act to attempt to pour scorn and ridicule upon a once Regal House now fallen from power. The princely race of Hohenzollern has, like every other, produced men good and bad, strong and weak, men of noble character and men of coarser mould, rulers bellicose andthe fact needs especial emphasisrulers peace-loving, mild, and conciliatory. Owing its sovereignty in the Mark of Brandenburg as it does to the diplomatic ability of one of the line, the dynasty can show a whole succession of compliant, unwarlike, and amenable persons among subsequent rulers of the race. No peace with the Hohenzollerns, the everlasting fighting-cocks of Europe!: that cry for vengeance and extermination which went up during the World Warmore particularly from our relations, the Anglo-Saxon racescannot be justified on any historical basis; in every age the family can put up a good defence against such a defamation of their breed.

If any one particular family trait can be said with certainty to characterize the Hohenzollerns from generation to generation, it must be, at worst, the overweening sense of their own power, the tendency to despotism, which is to be found in most of them. And it is just this haughty absolutism, degenerating from time to time into pure tyranny, which has apparently drawn down on this Royal House in fullest measure the furious enmity of the freer peoples of Western Europe and of democratic America. Never before has any dynasty been the target of such loathing and scorn as fell to the lot of William II and all his House, and was reflected in English, French, and American journals during the four years of the War. Foreign nations regarded, and were determined to regard, him as the man chiefly responsible for the War, and he was attacked through his ancestors and his very grandchildren with an excess of malice, which, after the flight of that last Emperor, may well appear exaggerated and ludicrous.

The present book invites its readers to a tour of the ancestral portrait gallery of the Hohenzollerns; it is an unprejudiced attempt to present them in all simplicity as they gaze down upon us from the paint and canvas of what they did and what they left undone. That the personality, the mind, and temperament of the self-constituted guide will, indeed must, find incidental expression is, of course, self-evident. We have long since realized the impossibility of writing history from a purely objective, an entirely impartial standpoint, unless a mere string of facts and documents are to be set down without comment; and even such a bald enumeration of historical facts can hardly be quite uncoloured and dispassionate. Since Napoleons time we know that even Tacitus, who boasted that he would tell the story of the early days of Imperial Rome sine ira et studiowithout passion or purposewas not only entirely biased and one-sided, but did not even take the question of the truth of his facts very seriously. The history of the World War, to take as the clearest possible example this most recent and most terrible experience of the white races of the world, will read very differently according to whether a German, an Englishman, an American, a Frenchman, or a Russian is the historian, just as we get varying presentations of the age of the great upheavals in the Church according to the creed of each chronicler. Thus, consciously or unconsciously, the writers personal attitude towards the men and questions of which he treats colours his account of them, let him take what pains he will to be wholly impartial. Each man reads and writes so-called world history as he chooses to see it or to tell it; whence it frequently comes about that the writing of history, the making sense of the meaningless as a wicty sceptic has called it, like one of those distorting mirrors composed of convex and concave surfaces which one sees at village fairs, may distort and minimize alleged heroes or magnify dwarfs. Still more often a whole history book is planned from the first to glorify or vilify those of whom it treats. But neither of these objects has been my concern here. I have traced the life and works of each individual Hohenzollern as impartially as I could, and have drawn them as true to life and to historical fact as my ability permitted. If here and there the effect is a little uncouth and ragged-edged, I would like to say in self-justification that in an age with no great taste for ancient history I had to do my best to portray these princes in the freshest colours on my palette, to give them the warmth and glow of life. It is of deliberate purpose, then, that in this book I have plied a more flamboyant and broader brush than is else my custom. The modern man, disinclined for the most part to occupy himself with the dead past, must have its story told with vigour, made intelligible and significant to him. Otherwise he will leave it unread and, easily sated and bored as he is, will study nothing but his own cherished time and age.

It seems, and has always seemed to me, well worth while if one can, as a biographer, arouse in the reader who gives one a portion of his time and attention a desire to pursue the subject fartherand that beyond the covers of ones own book. We should be ready to grasp at any means of rekindling the flagging interest felt to-day in history. It has been maintained, and not without justice, that we Germans have of late lacked great statesmen, and for this reason, among others, that we have ceased to cultivate a knowledge of history. The story of the Hohenzollerns coincides with a long stretch of the known history of our people, which indeed mirrors itself in them. The chief reproach we as Germans have to bring against them is that most of them took very little interest in their people, either in great matters or small. Few Hohenzollerns cared a straw for the intellectual and sthetic history of the German race. Many were actually hostile to Teutonism, and professed a ludicrous Gallicism even at a time when our literature had reached its fullest bloom. They did not even make any great attempt to cultivate society in Germany. Frederick the Great was perhaps a solitary exception; he tried to bring on his aristocracy, but gave them up as intellectually incapable of development. The other Hohenzollerns as a rule gathered a Court about thembut it was a mere crowd of gossips, male and female, toadies and sycophants. This scorn for the German character and people, this deliberate cutting of themselves off from the heart and pulse of the nation, a fault of which few of them can be cleared, having been acted upon and observed for hundreds of years was the eventual cause of the fall of their dynasty. The majority of the Hohenzollerns cared far less for the love of the Fatherland, the love of a free peopleupon which, as says the Imperial Anthem, the throne should rest firm as a rock in oceanthan for their own unlimited absolutism and their own sense of Divine right.