67 
 
 Y*2- +• 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2018 with funding from 
 Duke University Libraries 
 
 https://archive.org/details/menaroundkaiser01wile_0 
 
MEN AROUND THE 
 KAISER • THE MAKERS 
 OF MODERN GERMANY 
 
 By FREDERIC WILLIAM WILE 
 
 Berlin Correspondent of the London Daily Mail and New York Times 
 
 ILLUSTRATED WITH 
 PORTRAITS 
 
 *0 
 
 X 
 
 INDIANAPOLIS 
 
 THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY 
 PUBLISHERS 
 
Copyright, 1914 
 
 THE B 0 BBS-MERR 1 LL COMPANY 
 
TO MY WIFE 
 
PREFACE 
 
 W ILLIAM II., German Emperor and King 
 of Prussia, is about to commemorate 
 his Silver Jubilee. Twenty-five years 
 of eventful sovereignty have brought his Empire 
 to the pinnacle of national greatness. Under his 
 dynamic leadership the Fatherland has Advanced 
 to front rank in the peaceful arts of commerce and 
 trade, made herself the world’s first military power, 
 and become Britain’s formidable rival for the mas¬ 
 tery of the sea. No reign, medieval or modern, 
 records a more inspiring story of a people’s vault 
 to affluence and might. Wondrous and eloquent 
 are the statistical revelations of Germany’s bound¬ 
 ing growth in population, of Imperial Berlin’s rise 
 to metropolitan splendour, of the Empire’s colossal 
 foreign trade, of the amazing expansion of national 
 wealth, of the development of the merchant marine, 
 of the transformation of the Navy from a fleet of 
 frigates into an Armada of Dreadnoughts, of tri¬ 
 umphs countless in the realms of science, art and 
 industry, which combine to make the German name 
 synonymous with progress and power. 
 
 Vigorous and virile at fifty-four, his Silver 
 Jubilee finds the Kaiser still the world’s model 
 
PREFACE 
 
 of an aggressively able and ambitious monarch. 
 Posterity alone can decide whether he is the sin¬ 
 ister figure portrayed by detractors, a prince who 
 preaches peace and plots war, or whether his 
 strength and talents, as he is fond of assuring 
 Europe with mystifying eloquence, are sincerely 
 and inviolably dedicated to the cause of interna¬ 
 tional amity. Back of William II., at any rate, 
 lies a reign of unbroken peace. Whatever laurels 
 Mars may still have in store for him, the Kaiser 
 has ruled for a quarter of a century, rich only in 
 the achievements of an enlightened and industrious 
 civilisation. 
 
 The world at large, fascinated by his kaleido¬ 
 scopic and picturesque personality, is prone to 
 accord the Kaiser almost exclusive credit for the 
 Fatherland’s magic leap into Weltmacht. As Man¬ 
 aging Director of Germany, Ltd., Emperor William 
 has been called upon to play a heavy role, and has 
 played it with eminent success; but Germany’s de¬ 
 velopment has not been a one-man show. There 
 have been many Makers of Modern Germany. 
 Their identities and personalities, with rare excep¬ 
 tions, have escaped notice abroad amid the paeans 
 of praise so indiscriminately showered upon the 
 gifted Kaiser. To sketch the careers and characters 
 of some of these latter-day Teutonic Knights is 
 the purpose of this volume. 
 
 Berlin, 
 
 May, 1913. 
 
 F. W. W. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 "V" N the light of events, I am tempted to clothe this 
 collection of pen-pictures of the Kaisermanner 
 JL with a new sub-title—to call them the “War- 
 Makers of Modern Germany.” For Emperor 
 William at this hour undoubtedly rules a nation of 
 men who are all for war. Bismarck rallied the dis¬ 
 united peoples of the Empire-to-be round the cause 
 of William I of Prussia by distorting the Ems tele¬ 
 gram. But the historic effects of that patriotic 
 forgery were not more potent—the popularisation 
 of a manufactured war—than William II’s allegation 
 of four weeks ago, that the sword was “forced” 
 into his hand by the warlike preparations of the 
 Czar while German diplomacy was immersed in the 
 promotion of peace. 
 
 The fact remains that the Kaiser, never so 
 astute as in this super-crisis of his reign, con¬ 
 trived to make his people, the overwhelming ma¬ 
 jority of whom craved for the uninterrupted 
 continuance of their peaceful prosperity, mad for 
 war. Von Tirpitz, Von der Goltz, Von Koester 
 and their confreres are sailors and soldiers. War 
 is their trade. They have prayed for this day. But 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 the Ballins, the Gwinners, the Hauptmanns—the 
 merchant, the banker, the poet—who were yester¬ 
 day men of peace, either because of material in¬ 
 terests or sentimental predilections, are to-day 
 fervid devotees at the smoking shrine of Mars. The 
 Kaiser spoke and Germany became a nation of war- 
 makers. Two months ago the German War Party 
 numbered perhaps a million of the Empire’s 
 66,000,000 of inhabitants. To-day it is the Peace 
 Party which comprises the ignominious minority, 
 only it is impotent and inarticulate, which the War 
 Party distinctly was not. 
 
 This war of Germany’s was not born at Serajevo 
 on June 28, when the Archduke Franz Ferdinand 
 and his consort fell victims to the bullets of a Pan- 
 Servian fanatic. William of Hohenzollern has 
 not risked his dynastic all—that and nothing less 
 is at stake for him—on the impulse of two months’ 
 standing. Serajevo was a pretext, not a cause. 
 It only applied the match to a fire which' Military 
 Germany has been kindling for years. Treitschke 
 forecasted it—“our final, and greatest, reckoning” 
 with Europe. William II, with persistency and 
 energy which never ceased to challenge the admira¬ 
 tion of the world, has hammered the vital necessity 
 of preparing for it into his loyal people’s very 
 marrow. 
 
 It was my privilege, as the representative of 
 important American and English journalistic in¬ 
 terests, to live in Berlin during the final years of 
 the Fatherland’s restless preparation for war, to 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 see Germania making her battle toilet. For a 
 decade and more I have watched her steadily, rest¬ 
 lessly, becoming more terrible on land and sea. I 
 was present at the birth of her Dreadnought navy 
 —the launch of the Nassau, the first all-big-gun 
 battleship, in March, 1907—and saw her rise to 
 the rank of the world’s second mightiest sea power 
 in the brief span of seven years. Already the 
 strongest of land powers, I have seen Germany 
 within the past year in still a fresh spurt for mili¬ 
 tary supremacy, the raising of her peace army by 
 150,000 men to a grand total of nearly a million, 
 and the expanding of her whole colossal war estab¬ 
 lishment at a cost of $250,000,000. I have observed 
 the development of an entirely new school of German 
 literature—the Bernhardi-Reventlow-Keim cult— 
 under the militant patronage of Crown Prince 
 Frederick William, and marveled with the wonder 
 of a simple democrat at its brazen apotheosis of 
 war as the true foundation of German greatness 
 and at its categorical prognostication of war’s 
 imminence. I have witnessed the development of 
 gigantic Navy and Army Leagues, with member¬ 
 ships running into the millions, whose frank pur¬ 
 pose is to educate the masses in the doctrine that 
 war is inevitable and must be prepared for on a 
 Brobdingnagian scale. I have met and read the 
 political professors of the great universities, the 
 mentors of the flower of the nation, who pillory 
 Pacifism as a corrosive, un-German ideal and con¬ 
 demn the principle of compulsory arbitration of 
 
TRODUCTION 
 
 international disputes as unworthy the consideration 
 of descendants of Frederick the Great. I have 
 digested a library of books and brochures with one, 
 universal Leitmotif, denunciation of the cruel fate 
 which compels “the world’s most virile race” to 
 remain content with territorial confines more fitted 
 to Portugal than Germany. I have watched the 
 progress of the Imperial Bank’s policy of “financial 
 mobilisation,” so successfully pursued that when 
 war came the Rcichsbank disposed over the heaviest 
 gold reserve in its history, $325,000,000, the exact 
 sum, perhaps not wholly by coincidence, of the 
 credits asked by the government for the inaugura¬ 
 tion of the Kaiser’s campaign against Europe. And 
 I have seen the German War Chest in the Julius 
 Tower at Spandau, Bismarck’s creation for the 
 initial cost of mobilisation, increased from a paltry 
 $30,000,000 to $90,000,000 between 1913 and 
 1914. 
 
 To the world at large, I fancy, these stupendous 
 preparations are no longer enigmatical. If they 
 were precautions for peace, the imagination must 
 reel at the thought of what Germany could have 
 done in the way of preparations for war. We know 
 now why the gray legions of the Kaiser poured 
 through the streets of captive Brussels with bakeries 
 on wheels and steaming soup-pots—the last word in 
 organised efficiency. Those ovens and pots were 
 the symbols of the deadly thoroughness and readi¬ 
 ness with which Germany began this struggle. 
 
 Humanity is asking why Germany’s Supreme 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 War Lord chose midsummer of placid 1914 for the 
 carrying out of his plans; why, in the name of the 
 Christian conscience he is so fond of invoking, there 
 was foisted upon Germany and upon Europe a con¬ 
 flict destined to reduce to insignificance all the wars 
 of men which have ever gone before; why the 
 Kaiser, admired as the paragon of sagacious, patri¬ 
 otic rulership, consented to a war which is bound, 
 whatever its end, to wreck the prosperity of Ger¬ 
 many for a generation, to bring sadness unutterable 
 to thousands of her homes, to obliterate her young 
 manhood as if by pestilence, to set back the wheels 
 of civilisation itself, by reestablishing the era of 
 man-killing savagery? Why? 
 
 Because the German War Party felt that the hour 
 was ripe at last for the gratification of its sanguinary 
 ambitions for the subjugation of Europe; because 
 it said to itself “Now or never!”; because it believed 
 that Germany, armed as never before in conse¬ 
 quence of years of systematic preparation, was 
 more ready for the “final reckoning” than any of 
 her foes. 
 
 The spurred and helmeted autocrats of Berlin 
 and Potsdam held the army of Russia in utter 
 contempt—said so in plain language up to the very 
 hour war began. They flouted the “new France” 
 and boasted they would humble the Republic in 
 less time than they had humiliated the Third Empire. 
 They looked across the North Sea, saw Ireland on 
 the brink of civil war, and opined that Perfidious 
 Albion, even though she might belie history and 
 
 i 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 for once essay to be true to her friends and allies, 
 could not dream of intervention in a great Con¬ 
 tinental war. Of such a thing as resistance to 
 Germany’s descent upon Belgium the Berlin mili¬ 
 tary clique never dreamed. On the good will of the 
 people of the United States the German war zealots 
 banked as confidently as on the efficiency of their 
 General Staff. Had not the Kaiser’s policy of 
 cajolery been in merry operation for twelve years 
 and more—from the day he sent his brother on a 
 visit to these shores to the last be jeweled order 
 bestowed upon some American millionaire? Could 
 not “German-Americans” be relied upon to influence 
 American public opinion in their “ex-Fatherland’s” 
 favor, when the Mailed Fist deemed the hour to 
 strike had come? 
 
 These were the illusions which obsessed the minds 
 of the German War Party, long drunk with self- 
 confidence and arrogant sense of invincibility, and 
 which turned their intoxication into wild insensate 
 conviction that Europe was at last within their irre¬ 
 sistible grip. Germany’s war began as a War of 
 Miscalculations. 
 
 Lest I be accused of injustice to the German 
 name by taking refuge in generalities, let me say 
 and emphasize that the German people, the great 
 industrious masses of the nation, ought not to be 
 held responsible for the woe into which their 
 military overlords have plunged them and the 
 world. The people of Germany, among whom it 
 was my lot to spend the thirteen happiest and most 
 
 \ 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 fruitful years of my life, did not want war. They 
 were supinely dragged into it. They deserve the 
 world’s pity, not its condemnation. Europe and 
 Asia have united not to throttle the German people, 
 but the Moloch of Militarism which has yoked them 
 to its juggernaut and which will not be content 
 till it has subjugated the rest of Christendom, if 
 it be not crushed in this titanic struggle. How long, 
 for instance, do Americans think that Militarism 
 Triumphant would wait before demanding the 
 abandonment of that arrogant institution which we 
 are pleased to cherish as the Monroe Doctrine, 
 because—as young Germans are taught by their 
 university professors—it effectually bars the way to 
 the establishment of the goose-step in South 
 America? 
 
 These War-Makers of Modern Germany are 
 waging a fight worthy of their past and befitting 
 their present greatness. Amid the din and clash 
 of battle they have forgotten the whys and where¬ 
 fores of what preceded the conflict. Spurred on 
 by the sheer dictates of self-preservation, they are 
 warring as men always war when the stake is 
 national life or death. They will prove as terrible 
 in arms as they were mighty in peace. They will 
 not return defeated to workshop and hearth as 
 long as a flicker of fighting strength is left in 
 them. 
 
 My little son, born within ear-shot of the rifle- 
 ranges of Tempelhof Feld, will be proud to tell, in 
 the years to come, that he first saw the light of day, 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 not in the land of the Napoleonic Kaiser, but among 
 his people which, emerge as it may from this gory 
 cataclysm, will stand forth in the world’s story for¬ 
 ever, great and glorious. 
 
 The Author 
 
 New York, August 28, 1914. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 o I. Admiral von Tirpitz: Creator of the Navy... i y 
 
 o II. Alfred Ballin: Merchant of Hamburg. io xc 
 
 III. Dr. von Bethmann Hollweg: The Philos¬ 
 opher- Chancellor. 19 
 
 o IV. Prince Furstenberg: The Man Behind the 
 
 Throne. 27^. '— 
 
 o V. Arthur von Gwinner: Banker and Railway 
 
 Builder. 35 ^ 
 
 0 ‘' VI. Prince Henry of Prussia: Sailor and Sports¬ 
 man . 45^ 
 
 O VII. Count Zeppelin: Commander of the Air. 54 
 
 \ VIII. The Crown Prince: The Kaiser of To-morrow 
 
 O IX. Emil Rathenau: Engineer, Electrician, and 
 Financier. 
 
 X. Max Reinhardt: Stage Reformer. 
 
 XI. Ernst von Heydebrand: “The Uncrowned 
 King of Prussia”. 
 
 XII. Richard Strauss: Composer and Revolution¬ 
 ary . 
 
 63 
 
 71 V 
 
 80 
 
 97 
 
 XIII. Hans Delbruck: The Professor in Politics. . .. 106 
 
 XIV. August Scherl: Pioneer of the Press. 115 
 
 0 XV. Prince von Buelow: Statesman, Diplomat 
 
 and Sphinx. 123 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 0 XVI. Admiral von Koester: President of the Navy- 
 
 League. 132 
 
 P XVII. Marschall von Bieberstein: The Giant of 
 
 the Golden Horn. 140 
 
 C XVIII. August Thyssen: Iron King. 149 
 
 XIX. Max Liebermann: The German Millet. 158 
 
 XX. Bernhard Dernburg: A Business Man in 
 
 Politics. 168 
 
 0 XXI. Count von Bernstorff: A Democratic Diplo¬ 
 mat. 176 
 
 0 XXII. Krupp von Bohlen: The Master of Essen... . 184 
 
 XXIII. Maximilian Harden: Journalist and Matador 193 
 
 XXIV. Von Jagow: Foreign Secretary. 201 
 
 XXV. Von der Goltz: Organiser and Strategist. 208 
 
 % XXVI. Gerhart Hauptmann: Poet and Playwright... 218 
 
 XXVII. Prince Lichnowsky: The Peace-Keeper in 
 
 London. 228 
 
 XXVIII. Von Kiderlen Waechter: The Man of Agadir 237 
 
 ^ XXIX. Paul Ehrlich: Fighter of Disease. 245 
 
 0 XXX. Count von Posadowsky: Social Reformer. . .. 254 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 

I 
 
 VON TIRPITZ 
 
 W HEN the history of Germany’s mighty 
 naval development comes to be written 
 one name will stand out in boldest relief 
 —Von Tirpitz. To this giant, fork-bearded sailor- 
 statesman, a magnificent specimen of Teuton phy¬ 
 sique of the old school, must fall the lion’s share of 
 credit for the persistent aggressiveness with which 
 the Fatherland has rushed to front rank as a sea 
 power. He is the real creator of the Kaiser’s fleet. 
 
 “Tirpitz the Eternal,” they call him in Berlin. For 
 nearly fifteen years he has been unbrokenly at the 
 helm. No other German Minister but Bismarck 
 ever survived the vicissitudes of politics so long. 
 Imperial Chancellors have come and gone. War 
 Ministers, Foreign Secretaries, Chancellors of the 
 Exchequer, Home Secretaries and Postmasters- 
 General have appeared and disappeared by the half- 
 dozen. But the man who designed and launched the 
 Naval Law has gone on for ever—a n enduri ng 
 embodiment of the Fatherland’s determined and 
 consistent bid for power at sea. A fulsome “semi¬ 
 official” book recently off the press, “Kaiser 
 
 I 
 
 V. 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 Wilhelm II. and the Navy,” acclaims the Supreme 
 War Lord as the architect-in-chief of the German 
 Armada. At the risk of lese-rnajcstc, I make bold 
 to bestow the laurels where they belong—on Grand- 
 Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, Secretary of State for 
 the Imperial Navy since 1898. 
 
 A commoner by birth, with little at his back except 
 indomitable energy, will and ambition, Von Tirpitz 
 has advanced, through sheer force of ability and 
 zeal, from a naval cadetship to the supreme direction 
 of the Empire’s sea forces. He is the world’s only 
 Minister of Marine who incorporates the rare com¬ 
 bination of seamanship, executive talent and states¬ 
 manship. 
 
 Because he is a great politician, report periodi¬ 
 cally associates Von Tirpitz’s name with the Imperial 
 Chancellorship. Germany is not rich in strong men 
 of premiership rank. Von Tirpitz is one of them. 
 His work at the Admiralty may be said to be 
 finished. He has not only hewn the way, but trod it 
 for a decade and a half, and he has bred a school of 
 able subordinates who make the master hand no 
 longer indispensable. 
 
 A Von Tirpitz Chancellorship would mean but 
 one thing—a German Government with “full steam 
 ahead” as its naval policy. He is the man who con¬ 
 ceived the naval programme. It is he who abetted 
 and promoted the “supplementary” legislation which 
 has raised the Fatherland’s Fleet expenditure by 
 steady stages from $30,000,000 in 1898 to $125,- 
 000,000 in 1913. His is the astute diplomacy which 
 
 2 
 
VON TIRPITZ 
 
 has so successfully played upon the passions of 
 people and Parliament for the purpose of incessant 
 naval expansion. 
 
 Von Tirpitz’s career is an inspiring contradiction 
 of the theory that birth and caste are essential to 
 advancement in German Government service. Born 
 far remote from salt water, at Kiistrin-on-Oder, in 
 the Mark of Brandenburg, as the son of a Prussian 
 K. C., there is nothing in his origin to suggest the 
 future admiral and naval statesman. At sixteen, 
 at the end of a gymnasium education, he became 
 a cadet in the modest aggregation of frigates known 
 as the Prussian Navy. Four years later he had won 
 a lieutenancy, and at twenty-five he had attained 
 the coveted rank of a lieutenant-commander. It 
 was while in this comparatively unimportant posi¬ 
 tion that Von Tirpitz first revealed his amazing 
 capacity for initiative, and his ability to impose his 
 ideas on superior and inferior alike—talents which 
 supply the keynote of his character and which were 
 to prove the foundation of his career. He devel¬ 
 oped a marvellous habit of thinking and seeing far 
 ahead of comrades afloat and ashore. When he 
 had unfolded his ideas he proceeded to win adher¬ 
 ents, who found themselves championing Von 
 Tirpitz and his projects with even more enthusiasm 
 than he did himself. He seemed predestined to 
 create and to lead. A practice which rallied around 
 the enthusiastic young officer the keenest minds in 
 the service was his disregard of the ethics of mere 
 seniority and other relics of Prussian militarism 
 
 3 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 still latent in the budding Imperial Navy. He laid 
 down the principle that merit was the only claim to 
 real seniority, and that any other kind did not 
 count. 
 
 In 1891 Von Tirpitz had carved his way to the 
 chiefship of staff at the Kiel station, the head¬ 
 quarters of the Fleet, a position which gave him 
 rich opportunity for his inexhaustible powers of 
 initiative and organisation. With far-seeing eye 
 he first turned his attention to the creation and 
 perfection of the torpedo service. The German 
 Fleet’s acknowledged strength in that branch of 
 naval warfare is essentially and primarily Von 
 Tirpitz’s achievement. It was he who mapped 
 out and mobilised the torpedo-boat division, which, 
 when he took hold of it, consisted of a handful 
 of insignificant mosquito craft. He discovered 
 officers peculiarly adapted to the needs of torpedo 
 tactics, and by dint of restless example and enthu¬ 
 siasm, welded them into an aggregation of experts 
 who now form the backbone of the Empire’s sea¬ 
 fighting forces. Having founded the torpedo 
 school, Von Tirpitz now dedicated himself to 
 bringing order out of administrative chaos at the 
 Kiel station. He criticised fearlessly and irresist¬ 
 ibly. He attacked as archaic the system of co¬ 
 ordinate authority at the Admiralty in Berlin and 
 the water’s edge on the Baltic. It was reserved 
 for him a year and a half later to be elevated to 
 the heights at which he had himself hurled so many 
 vigorous broadsides—the State Secretaryship of 
 
 4 
 
VON TIRPITZ 
 
 the Admiralty at Berlin. He was to be given a 
 chance to prove his theories in practice. 
 
 It was a glorious opportunity to fail. There 
 were many ready to trip him. His advance from 
 the quarter-deck to the Cabinet had not left him 
 unscarred by rivals and critics. But Von Tirpitz 
 had acquired the art of succeeding, and so many 
 scalps were dangling at his belt before he had been 
 at the Admiralty two years, that the honour of a 
 vice-admiralship fell to him at the end of that 
 period. He was already known throughout the 
 service by the hardly less flattering unofficial title 
 of “Der Meister” (the master). 
 
 Von Tirpitz was already peering sagaciously into 
 the future. Having accomplished the herculean 
 task of administrative reorganisation, he began 
 to busy himself with the paramount question of 
 a fleet worthy of the name. Germany’s industrial 
 development was in full swing. Her oversea trade 
 and merchant marine were attaining gigantic pro¬ 
 portions. Von Tirpitz found the moment propitious 
 for spreading the gospel of a great Navy. Then, 
 in the autumn of 1899, came the historic Bundesrat 
 incident. The seizure of a German mail-packet 
 by an English man-of-war was exploited with 
 Napoleonic skill as an ocular demonstration of the 
 constant danger confronting the unprotected Ger¬ 
 man merchant flag. The Naval Law of 1900 was 
 born in Von Tirpitz’s brain amid a wave of patriotic 
 fervour which the Bundesrat affair sent rolling 
 across the Fatherland. Its passage earned him 
 
 5 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 the honour of hereditary nobility, the coveted von. 
 The launching of the first big battleships under the 
 new Bill, the 13,000-tonners of the Braunschweig 
 class, in 1902 brought him still another distinction, 
 the rank of full admiral. In 1907, after Von 
 Tirpitz had induced the Reichstag, through skilful 
 preparation of public sentiment, to pass the Sup¬ 
 plementary Naval Bill, raising the displacement of 
 battleships and battle-cruisers to Dreadnought pro¬ 
 portions at the rate of four to six launchings a 
 year, the grateful Supreme War Lord conferred 
 upon his able administrator the Order of the Black 
 Eagle, the highest German reward for distinguished 
 merit. 
 
 It would libel Von Tirpitz to stigmatise him as 
 Anglophobe. He is anything but that. He is a 
 profound admirer of everything British. All his 
 children have been educated in England. English 
 naval traditions command his reverential respect. 
 He has never ceased to hold them up to German 
 sailormen as a model and inspiration. When he 
 designed the Naval Law, he had little idea of 
 entering the lists with Britain as an active com¬ 
 petitor. British mistakes—the opportunities offered 
 Germany to catch up with the Mistress of the Seas 
 —gave him his chance. He took it, being a wise 
 man and a statesman, and as often as succeeding 
 events provided fresh opportunities he seized them 
 too. 
 
 Manifold and versatile as Von Tirpitz’s services 
 have been they have been pre-eminent on the 
 
 6 
 
VON TIRPITZ 
 
 administrative side. Till he took hold of the 
 Admiralty, German naval conditions were more or 
 less chaotic. They lacked the continuity and sys¬ 
 tem of the Army. The conception of the programme 
 was his first achievement. Then he was confronted 
 with the task of popularising it and of manipulat¬ 
 ing public sentiment from time to time, whenever 
 the moment was ripe for extending the ramifica¬ 
 tions of the original project. The triumphs of the 
 Navy League and of the Admiralty Press Bureau 
 —the conversion of the nation to a religious belief 
 in its “bitter need’’ of sea-power and in its “future 
 on the water”—are the triumphs of Von Tirpitz. 
 He may himself disavow them, as he does so per¬ 
 suasively and adroitly from his place in the Reichs¬ 
 tag on recurring occasions, but the laurels are his 
 for all that. The pamphlets and Press polemics 
 and periodical campaigns which always precede and 
 accompany German naval increases bear far too 
 plainly the earmarks of a directing genius to be 
 identified with anybody but “Tirpitz the Eternal.” 
 
 Iron resoluteness is Von Tirpitz’s dominating 
 characteristic. It has been the making of him and 
 of the German Fleet. He is the one minister of 
 his imperious master who is not accustomed to 
 yield. He has a will of his own and knows how 
 to enforce it. 
 
 It has been my privilege on occasion to discuss 
 Anglo-German naval policy with Von Tirpitz. 
 He is suavity and frankness incarnate. He con¬ 
 fesses unreservedly that his idea of German sea- 
 
 7 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 power is that the Fatherland must prepare itself as 
 soon as possible to throw decisive weight into the 
 political scales wherever its vital interests are con¬ 
 cerned. If the balance of power is altered to a 
 degree which threatens Germany’s capacity to ex¬ 
 ercise such influence, Von Tirpitz is ready instantly 
 to demand fresh sacrifices from his countrymen. 
 Specifically, he favours the two-to-three standard 
 as the only goal compatible with German necessities, 
 as far as Great Britain is concerned., He believes 
 that the possession of a fleet two-thirds as powerful 
 in offensive units as the British Navy, would 
 effectually prevent combined Anglo-French military 
 operations against Germany, besides making naval 
 warfare, in the spirit of the Fleet Law’s preamble, 
 a grave risk for Britain. He believes religiously 
 in the invincible superiority of German guns— 
 that they will decide the issue to Germany’s im¬ 
 perishable glory on the day when the Kaiser’s 
 Trafalgar is to be fought and won. He denies 
 Germany’s culpability for the ruinous competition 
 in naval armaments. He avers the author of the 
 Dreadnought is alone guilty. He disclaims per¬ 
 suasively the notion that the German Fleet is built 
 for aggression, and he is irrevocably opposed to 
 limiting its development by agreements of any kind. 
 These are the ideals Von Tirpitz has implanted in 
 his subordinates at the Reichsmarineamt. They 
 will live on, long after he evacuates the Secretary¬ 
 ship of State for the Navy, whether for more 
 exalted surroundings in the Wilhelmstrasse or for 
 
 8 
 
VON TIRPITZ 
 
 a life of retirement after eminent national 
 service. 
 
 Imperial Germany will be well guided if Von 
 Tirpitz is ever called to the bridge. Sound, sane 
 and sagacious, still young at sixty-three, a fearless, 
 broadminded patriot, a bluff sailorman who presides 
 over an ideal family life, he is a statesman in every 
 fibre. 
 
 Germany would lose in him a great naval adminis¬ 
 trator to g'-'iia great Chancellor. 
 
II 
 
 BALLIN 
 
 O VER the portal of a massive granite office¬ 
 building on the shores of Hamburg’s 
 placid Alster rests a tablet inscribed “My 
 Field is the World.” It is the fitting emblem of 
 the Hamburg-American Line, a private corporation 
 almost as dear to the heart of the Kaiser and his 
 people as their Navy itself. It is, indeed, a national 
 institution, the “Hapag,” as current custom in 
 Germany abbreviates the title of the Hamburg- 
 Amerikanische Paketfahrt - Aktien - Gesellschaft, 
 which was founded in the wooden-ship era of 
 “Milestones.” With its great confrere of Bremen, 
 the North German Lloyd, it has blazed the way 
 for German trade and commerce to the uttermost 
 corners of the earth. What Von Tirpitz has done 
 for the German Fleet, Albert Ballin, Director- 
 General of the Hamburg-American Line, has done 
 for the German mercantile marine. He has made 
 it. Historians of the German Empire of to-day, 
 when they write of the race which gloried in bat¬ 
 talions, battleships and business, will give high 
 place, if they have read the signs of the times 
 aright, to the unassuming Hamburg Jew, who has 
 renounced titles, honours and office, but not his 
 creed. 
 
 “Who is the greatest German?” was the poser 
 io 
 
BALLIN 
 
 once fired at a young Pomeranian giant undergoing 
 a peremptory cross-examination in history with 
 his fellow-recruits at a Prussian garrison. “Ballin!” 
 was the flashing reply. That is what several million 
 perspicacious Germans ;think about it. No other 
 man in the country, King or commoner, has a 
 stronger claim to membership of the immortals of 
 Emperor William’s day. He is one of the real 
 Makers of Modern Germany. Ballin of Hamburg 
 stands in the same relation to the Kaiser as did 
 those counsellors of another generation to their 
 sovereigns and governments—Rothschild of Paris 
 to Napoleon III., and Bleichroeder of Berlin to 
 Emperor William I. and Bismarck. Having tried 
 and failed repeatedly to make him a Cabinet Min¬ 
 ister, William II. advises with the Director-General 
 of the Hapag. Ballin always insists he can be of 
 more service to the Fatherland on the Alsterdamm 
 than in the Wilhelmstrasse. He would be ludi¬ 
 crously out of place in a bureaucratic environment. 
 On one of the various occasions when the Kaiser 
 sought to saddle a Ministership on Ballin, or tack 
 von on his plebeian name, or give him hereditary 
 membership in the Prussian House of Peers, Ballin 
 compromised by accepting His Majesty’s photo¬ 
 graph. The Kaiser inscribed it: “To the far-seeing 
 and tireless pioneer of our commerce and export 
 ■ trade.’’ That is a title of which Albert Ballin, long 
 the uncrowned king of his native Republic of Ham¬ 
 burg, is prouder than Von, Excellenz, Staatssekre- 
 tar, Geheimrat or any of the other elongated tags, 
 
 ii 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 to the acquisition of which the average Teuton 
 devotes his life. 
 
 Ballin is a thoroughly self-made man. He was 
 born into the trade in which he was one day to be 
 a world-figure, as the son of a humble Hamburg 
 emigrant agent. Following the practice still in 
 vogue among ambitious young Germans, Ballin 
 went to England as a lad to serve his commercial 
 apprenticeship. The irrepressible Hamburg “vol¬ 
 unteer” went in to master the most infinitesimal 
 details of the navigation business, and specialised 
 in emigrant traffic, the gold-mine from which 
 Transatlantic lines extract their richest gains. On 
 his return to Germany Ballin entered the employ 
 of the Carr Line, and was presently entrusted with 
 the minor duty of conducting emigrant cargoes 
 from Galicia, Poland and Hungary to Hamburg, 
 and embarking them for the Land of Promise 
 oversea. His eminent organising talent and sleep¬ 
 less zeal speedily made his superiors see that he was 
 fitted for far more important work. They appointed 
 him manager of their entire emigrant service. He 
 was barely twenty-five when these, the first honours 
 of his chosen career, came to him. It was not very 
 long before the Hamburg-American Line began to 
 take notice that for some mysterious reason the 
 Carrs were getting the cream of the emigration 
 business. Somebody, or something, was causing 
 the pilgrims from Southern and Eastern Europe 
 to flock to the smaller rival’s steamers. It was dis¬ 
 covered that a certain Ballin was the culprit. The 
 
 12 
 
BALLIN 
 
 only way to suppress him, it appeared, and to 
 annihilate the competition, was to buy out the Carr 
 Line bodily. In 1886 it passed into the Hapag’s 
 possession, and Ballin with it. The history of the 
 Hamburg-American’s development dates from the 
 hour it annexed the young man who had cornered 
 the emigrant market. 
 
 Figures talk. In 1886, when Ballin joined the 
 Hapag, its capital was $3,750,000. To-day it is 
 $37,5 00 , 00 °. Its gross profits were $625,000. In 
 1912 they were $14,125,000. In 1886, twenty-six 
 ocean-going steamships flew the Company’s blue- 
 and-white pennant. To-day it flutters from the 
 peaks of one hundred and eighty. In the ante- 
 Ballin era the Hapag’s total tonnage was sixty 
 thousand. This summer a single vessel of fifty 
 thousand tons, the peerless Imperator, is in her 
 maiden season. With a sister ship and other 
 leviathans under construction, the Hamburg- 
 American’s gross tonnage will aggregate roundly 
 1,500,000—a total which dwarfs the merchant 
 fleets of half a dozen European States. 
 
 The secret of Ballin’s greatness lies in his card- 
 index mind. He has an incorrigible habit of laying 
 stress on the unconsidered trifles, and storing them 
 up systematically. When he was a shipping clerk 
 in England, at nothing a week, he worked overtime 
 absorbing the quips and tricks of the business. He 
 was a stickler for the little things. Nothing escaped 
 him. He developed a fabulous memory. As soon 
 as he learned a thing, he numbered, labelled and 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 filed it away in the well-ordered archive which 
 serves him as a brain. When he meets the shipping 
 magnates of Britain, America, France, Holland and 
 Scandinavia in conference nowadays, he staggers 
 them with his first-hand knowledge of what others 
 mistakenly consider the bagatelles of the game. 
 When the Hamburg-American Line acquired Ballin, 
 along with some minor assets in the shape of emi¬ 
 grant steamers and goodwill, he brought to them, 
 ready-made, the far-reaching plans which were to 
 make the German merchant flag familiar and for¬ 
 midable on the high seas. 
 
 The new director, not yet out of the impetuous 
 twenties, did not find it easy to impose his pro¬ 
 gressive ideas on the Hanseatic patricians in control 
 of the Hapag. His demand for twin-screw steam¬ 
 ers shocked them. His insistence that the day had 
 come to give ocean-travellers luxuries instead of 
 mere comforts sent cold chills down their con¬ 
 servative spines. Seven-day boats seemed to them 
 as visionary as flying-machines. Ballin anticipated 
 all that. He bided his time. By degrees, almost 
 before they knew it, the greybeards of the direc¬ 
 torate found themselves succumbing enthusiastically 
 to the indomitable will and inexhaustible initiative 
 of their colleague of the fiery spirit, restless energy 
 and overweening self-confidence. They saw he 
 was predestined to lead. Gradually they gave him 
 full sway. In 1900 he was appointed Director- 
 General of the entire organisation. Since then his 
 power has been autocratic. 
 
 L4 
 
BALLIN 
 
 Ballin’s plans for developing the Line were 
 separated into two distinct divisions. As the 
 elementary essential, he equipped it with a fleet 
 of modern vessels and replenished it periodically 
 with newer ships. He saw from afar the approach 
 of the luxury age and met it more than halfway. 
 He recognized the moral value of the conquest of 
 the blue ribbon of the Atlantic and built the 
 Deutschland, which captured it on the New York- 
 Plymouth route in 1900, with a passage of five days, 
 seven hours and thirty-eight minutes. The North 
 German Lloyd snatched the record three years later, 
 but it remained in German keeping until the 
 Lusitania re-won it for England in 1907. Ballin’s 
 next move was to extend the services of the Hapag 
 until they literally spanned the earth. His latest 
 project in that direction is about to be inaugurated— 
 a service between the Eastern and Western coasts 
 of the United States via the Panama Canal. The 
 material accoutrements of a world-wide maritime 
 organisation having been provided, Ballin now occu¬ 
 pied himself with the no less important question of 
 strategy and tactics, with that phase of business 
 known as policy. In this realm, too, he was destined 
 to display acumen and capacity of a high order. 
 He early proclaimed himself an adherent of the 
 pool system, and helped to found the North Atlantic 
 Union, which still regulates Transatlantic traffic. 
 Conciliatory by nature, he has always opposed rate 
 fights and other forms of ruinous competition, but, 
 being in them, has not shrunk from making war to 
 
 15 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 the knife, as Liverpool and Southampton know. 
 He was prompt to identify himself with Mr. Pier- 
 pont Morgan’s Ocean Trust in 1901, and has effected 
 numerous working agreements with English, Dutch 
 and Scandinavian competitors. 
 
 Of the left-handed compliments Lord Palmer¬ 
 ston was fond of paying Germany, none ever 
 left a more burning sting than his famous taunt 
 that though the Germans might till the soil and 
 build castles in the air, they had never, since the 
 beginning of time, had the genius to cross the high 
 seas or even navigate narrow waters. Before 
 Palmerston’s century ended, Britain was to recognise 
 her mightiest rival in despised Germany, both in 
 the merchant trade and in the naval realm. Ballin 
 will tell you that the Lusitania and Mauretania 
 themselves were Made in Germany. He means to 
 say that Great Britain, in order to regain the 
 pre-eminence which German shipping had usurped, 
 resorted to the policy of subsidising or semi-subsidis- 
 ing the Cunard Line and enabling it to build a class 
 of vessels which no unassisted navigation company 
 could afford either to construct or operate. Ballin is 
 an uncompromising foe of subsidies in whatever 
 form garbed. He calls the Cunard giantesses “hot¬ 
 house plants.” He considers State subsidies insidi¬ 
 ous, because of the impulse they must inevitably give 
 the nations to outbid one another. He says they 
 spell demoralisation. Ballin strongly advocates the 
 assembling of a conference to abolish shipping 
 subsidies by International agreement, as was done 
 
 16 
 
BALLIN 
 
 in the case of sugar bounties. He makes a reserva¬ 
 tion with regard to the United States. Ship¬ 
 building is 33 1-3 per cent, dearer there than in 
 England or Germany, and he thinks the United 
 States Government could justify a sane policy of 
 temporary subsidies. 
 
 Since the Deutschland, Ballin has built no fast 
 ships. He was frankly sceptical of the virtues of 
 the turbine, but acknowledges its unqualified success 
 in the Cunard flyers. He still inclines to the belief 
 that six or seven days on the Atlantic is not too 
 much for any globe-trotter, but Ballin is not the 
 man to rest content indefinitely with second place, 
 and it is safe to predict that one of these days he 
 will again take up the British challenge for the speed 
 championship. 
 
 In his private life Ballin is modest to the point 
 of shyness and seclusion. Small of stature, his 
 bearing and ways are always unobtrusive. He is 
 at his office punctually every morning at nine and 
 presides daily over a noon-hour conference of his 
 managerial board. He is a managing director 
 who manages and directs. He is usually the last 
 to leave after a full day’s work. Audiences of the 
 Shipping King are granted reluctantly. More people 
 fail than succeed in seeing him. The Kaiser seldom 
 comes to Hamburg without visiting Ballin’s unpre¬ 
 tentious suburban villa and showing some fresh 
 mark of his esteem. All doors are now open to 
 Ballin—some were once slammed and barred— 
 but his happiest hours are spent at work or in the 
 
 *7, 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 bosom of his home. Herr and Frau Ballin have 
 only an adopted daughter, married to an ex-naval 
 officer, now in the Hapag service. While she 
 lived, Baffin's aged mother was the idol of his 
 affection. He is a devout but not a bigoted Jew. 
 None of his co-religionists has a position of conse¬ 
 quence in his organisation. He does not believe 
 in religious nepotism. He has resolutely refused to 
 follow the fashion of plutocratic German brethren 
 who embrace Christianity for social revenue. It 
 annoys many German aristocrats that the Kaiser 
 consorts so freely with a man who is proud of his 
 origin. Still on the sunny side of sixty, he has 
 many years of usefulness before him. 
 
 Two years ago was the silver anniversary of 
 Baffin’s connection with the Hamburg-American 
 Line. Germans of all classes are accustomed to 
 celebrate jubilees with pomp and circumstance. 
 Hamburg would have delighted to honour its 
 favourite son. A week before June 2nd, which 
 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary, Ballin went 
 cruising in a yacht. He left no address, and he 
 did not return until people had forgotten all about 
 his “ jubilee.” Then he drove up to his office one 
 day and went back to work. 
 
Ill 
 
 VON BETHMANN HOLLWEG 
 
 I MPERIAL Germany has had five Chancellors. 
 Bismarck, the incomparable, was a statesman; 
 Caprivi and Hohenlohe, respectively, soldier 
 and courtier; Billow was a diplomat; Bethmann 
 Plollweg, since 1909 the steersman of the Empire’s 
 destinies, is a philosopher. Four years hardly 
 afford an adequate basis for historical judgment 
 of a Premier’s capacity; but Dr. Theobald von 
 Bethmann Hollweg’s Chancellorship has been 
 uncommonly barren of promise ever of emerging 
 from egregious mediocrity into the inspiring light 
 of an epoch. Of him it can well be said, as Mr. 
 Roosevelt remarked of Mr. Taft during the late 
 unpleasantness in the United States, that he is a 
 man who means well feebly. It has not been given 
 to him to accomplish. During his tenancy of the 
 palace hallowed with memories of blood and iron, 
 the reign of William II. has not taken on fresh 
 lustre. 
 
 Before the present Kaiser had outgrown the age 
 of precocity, Bismarck opined in a famous prog¬ 
 nostication: “This young man will be his own 
 Reichskanzler.” The Empire-builder was doomed 
 
 19 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 himself to experience the relentless accuracy of his 
 own prophecy; but never since his first pilot was 
 dropped has William II. been so much his own - 
 Chancellor as during the administration of the 
 cultured and agreeable bureaucrat who is now the 
 responsible head of the German Government and 
 Prussian Ministry. There is no manner of doubt 
 that Bethmann Hollweg enjoys the Kaiser’s “con¬ 
 fidence.” 
 
 Were Dr. von Bethmann Hollweg’s career to be 
 terminated to-day—the mercies of the German 
 Constitution, which make Chancellors responsible to 
 emperors and not to Parliaments, alone prolong it— 
 the friendliest chronicler could review his Premier¬ 
 ship only in negligible terms. It has been a quad- 
 rennium of innocuousness. The “strength” which 
 the world associates with the name of the German 
 Government has been in no sense derived of him. 
 In the realm of foreign affairs his regime has been 
 distinguished by the fiasco of the wrecked raid on 
 Morocco. At home, the philosopher-Chancellor has 
 been beset by political disaster and national dis¬ 
 content. The ancient foe of German Governments, 
 Social Democracy, thriving on popular revolt against 
 semi-autocratic rule and archaic electoral laws, has 
 grown to unprecedented dimensions and become 
 the most powerful party in the land. With 
 Roman Catholicism, the next strongest of political 
 organisations, Bethmann Hollweg is on terms of 
 open hostility. Conservatism, the traditional prop 
 of Throne and Government, is ready to give the 
 
 20 
 
VON BETHMANN HOLLWEG 
 
 fifth Chancellor the happy dispatch the moment he 
 dares to assail its vested interests; and Liberalism, 
 or such as remains of that once virile element, 
 when not in conflict makes common cause with 
 him reluctantly. Politically, he is reduced to a 
 state of miserable isolation. 
 
 Yet it would be far beside the mark to charge 
 the Sage of Hohen-Finow with utter lack of states¬ 
 manlike qualities. Modest and retiring by nature, 
 there is nothing of the flamboyant in his make-up. 
 He has undoubtedly achieved many a victory by 
 methods more spectacular contemporaries at home 
 and abroad are accustomed to shun. He is, above 
 all, thoroughly sincere and honest. His influence is 
 always on the side of moderation. The tricks and 
 traits of the professional politician and diplomat 
 are beneath him. He is what in America is known 
 as safe and sane. The Agadir adventure, which 
 brought Europe to the brink of war in 1911, never 
 originated with Bethmann Hollweg. He fathered 
 it, as was his Constitutional duty, but nobody who 
 knows him doubts but that he rued it, too. Robber- 
 baron politics are no part of his equipment. He is 
 an earnest apostle of peace and friendship with 
 England. His hand was never meant to clench a 
 mailed fist. One cannot conceivably imagine him 
 in the Bismarckian role of thundering forth to a 
 cowering Europe that “We Germans fear God, and 
 nothing else in the world!’’ One finds him in a 
 more natural and congenial atmosphere when 
 hurling philosophic shrapnel like “God-willed 
 
 21 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 dependence" at a Prussian Diet minority clamouring 
 impotently for suffrage reform. Germany lost a 
 great schoolmaster when Bethmann Hollweg chose 
 politics for a career. He has been called the 
 incarnation of passionate doctrinarianism. 
 
 When Bethmann Hollweg was elevated to the 
 Imperial Chancellorship, his appointment was hailed 
 as that of a “Kaiser man”—the type of official 
 supposed to be peculiarly after the heart of William 
 of Plohenzollern. They had been at university 
 together at Bonn, and the sentimental ties which 
 have always united the Kaiser to his fellow-students 
 kept the young bureaucrat fresh in his Sovereign’s 
 memory. As Prince Billow’s Vice-Chancellor, 
 Bethmann Hollweg had long been a logical can¬ 
 didate for the Chancellorship. His selection became 
 a foregone conclusion from the moment Prince 
 Biilow, in response to the Kaiser’s invitation, 
 nominated him as his successor. 
 
 The new Chancellor had had a distinguished 
 official career, and had risen by legitimate steps to 
 Prime Ministerial rank, but was a little-known 
 personality. The type of a Prussian bureaucrat, who 
 began as assessor, rose to county supervisor, became 
 a provincial president, then a Prussian Minister, and 
 later an Imperial Secretary of State, his advance 
 through the stereotyped grades of German official¬ 
 dom was steady and characteristic. Self-effacing by 
 temperament, he never intruded himself into the 
 glare of public notice. His administrative career 
 was marked by a studious restriction to routine 
 
 22 
 
VON BETHMANN HOLLWEG 
 
 duties. His speeches in the Prussian Diet and House 
 of Peers, and in the Reichstag were distinguished 
 for nothing but straightforwardness, sincerity and 
 thoroughness. He was never once known to 
 electrify the country or Parliament. But he won a 
 reputation in the governing set for honesty, con¬ 
 servatism, and loyalty, and those are qualities which 
 have gone far to compensate the Fatherland for 
 the brilliancy of Prince Biilow. 
 
 Dr. von Bethmann Plollweg’s official career has 
 lain far remote from the paths of diplomacy and 
 foreign affairs. His have been the prosaic problems 
 of local government and home administration— 
 fields in which he is almost without a peer among his 
 countrymen. He approached the task of directing 
 Germany’s Weltpolitik, therefore, an utter novice. 
 Before he was Chancellor a year the Kaiser prac¬ 
 tically withdrew foreign affairs from Bethmann 
 Hollweg's hands, to transfer them to the experienced 
 control of Herr von Kiderlen-Wachter. 
 
 The Chancellor is a born Brandenburger, a native 
 of Hohen-Finow, a village in the Mark, three- 
 quarters of an hour west of Berlin. He is fifty- 
 seven years old. His family, ennobled in 1840, is 
 an old-time Frankfort merchant and banking 
 dynasty, pre-eminent in finance in the ante-Roth- 
 schild era. Originally it consisted of two branches, 
 Bethmann and Hollweg, which became united under 
 a single name through intermarriage. The founder 
 of the Bethmann branch was driven from Holland 
 in the seventeenth century on account of his 
 
 2 3 
 
a MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 religion. Chancellor von Bethmann Hollweg’s 
 grandfather was the first of the family to identify 
 himself with public life. An excellent lawyer, he 
 became a professor of jurisprudence at Bonn 
 University, receiving the patent of nobility as a 
 mark of distinction for his learning. As a member 
 of the Prussian Legislature in the ’forties, he was 
 in the thick of the constitutional struggles which 
 had their culmination in 1848, and ten years later 
 he became Minister of Education in a Liberal 
 Cabinet. From this hardy stock, a sterling mixture 
 of traders, bankers, scholars and politicians, the 
 Kaiser chose his fifth Chancellor. 
 
 After leaving Bonn University young Von Beth¬ 
 mann Hollweg took the State examination for the 
 Civil Service, mounting the first rung on the bureau¬ 
 cratic ladder, that of an “Assessorship,” in 1885. 
 In 1899 the Emperor promoted his college friend 
 to the high post of President of the Government 
 of Bromberg, and within three months advanced 
 him still another grade by making him President of 
 the province of Brandenburg, with headquarters at 
 Potsdam, where he was once again to enjoy the 
 comradeship of his imperial patron. The Presidency 
 of Brandenburg is a stepping-stone to Ministerial 
 honours in Prussia, and 1905 brought Von Beth¬ 
 mann Hollweg the traditional distinction in the 
 shape of appointment as Prussian Home Secretary. 
 Two years later the Kaiser promoted him to a place 
 in the Imperial Government as Secretary of the 
 Imperial Home Office, the position which carries 
 
 24 
 
VON BETHMANN HOLLWEG 
 
 with it the additional rank of Vice-Chancellor and 
 Vice-President of the Prussian Ministry. 
 
 In all these offices Von Bethmann Hollweg dis¬ 
 tinguished himself by zeal, industry, and capacity. 
 His devotion to Prince von Biilow was a marked 
 feature of his Ministerial career. The late Chan¬ 
 cellor was accustomed frequently to entrust Von 
 Bethmann Hollweg with his representation in 
 critical parliamentary and political situations, and 
 their personal relations were intimate and con¬ 
 fidential. As a parliamentary figure Von Bethmann 
 Hollweg is not striking, but always impressive. He 
 is far less showy than Biilow, but more convincing 
 and thorough. Germany misses Billow’s raillery, 
 but gets in its stead plain speaking and the wit that 
 springs from brevity. Amiable and philosophic, 
 immensely tall and gaunt, with lofty forehead, 
 bespectacled, and professorial in manner, Von Beth¬ 
 mann Hollweg never fails to dominate when on his 
 feet, though he commands attention not by fire and 
 force so much as by soundness and lucidity. 
 
 Modern Germany is ripe for a statesman capable 
 of leading its aspirations for true political liberty. 
 To his standard would flock supporters as fervent 
 as those who rallied around Bismarck, when he per¬ 
 ceived and proceeded to gratify German longings 
 for national unity. It is a strange phenomenon 
 that a man of Bethmann Hollweg’s singular high¬ 
 mindedness and rugged integrity, who has so deep 
 a sense of personal injustice as to be melted to 
 tears by heartless Opposition caricatures, should 
 
 25 
 
 J 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 remain blind to the signs of the times in the pro¬ 
 gressive age of his progressive people. He entered 
 office as the heir of a humiliating Government defeat 
 at the hands of the Conservative-Catholic oligarch)'-, 
 which still holds the reins of parliamentary power 
 in Germany. Whether through inability or disin¬ 
 clination, Bethmann Hollweg has signally failed to 
 emancipate himself from the shackles of the “Black 
 and Blue” alliance which dethroned Prince Billow 
 and stands for reaction. 
 
 Meantime, public opinion identifies him with the 
 caste which stubbornly withholds from enlightened 
 Germany that great ideal of all genuinely liberated 
 nations—parliamentary institutions and truly repre¬ 
 sentative government. It has been said that they 
 will not be attained until the streets of Berlin have 
 run red with proletariat blood. In that dread hour, 
 if Bethmann, as he is called, be still at the helm, 
 history will not acquit the philosopher-chancellor of 
 the consequences. 
 
IV 
 
 PRINCE FURSTENBERG 
 
 IS Serene Highness Prince Maximilian 
 Egon zu Fiirstenberg, a German-Austrian 
 grand seigneur and multi-millionaire, is 
 the power behind the German throne. No man 
 rivals his influence in exalted quarters. Few have 
 ever enjoyed the confidence of William II. to even 
 an approximate extent. Himself of ancient noble 
 lineage, Prince Fiirstenberg is the one subject whom 
 the Kaiser treats as an equal, and his counsel has 
 been known to prevail over that of Chancellors and 
 Ministers of State. 
 
 Prince Fiirstenberg is far removed from the 
 stereotyped wirepuller of royal romance, spinning 
 sinister plots behind a puppet-monarch's throne. 
 He is the Kaiser's boon companion, the partner of 
 his joys and comrade of his sorrows, the friend to 
 whom the Sovereign turned in the darkest hour of 
 
 his reign, when Germany rocked with indignation 
 during the “personal regime” crisis provoked by the 
 Daily Telegraph incident of November, 1908. 
 
 Repeatedly the Kaiser has urged his plutocratic 
 crony to become his Imperial Chancellor, to ex- 
 
 27 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 change the role of best friend for that of the 
 Crown’s first and responsible adviser. With a reali¬ 
 sation of his limitations which does him credit, 
 Prince Fiirstenberg has steadfastly refused to accept 
 the burdens of office. His only official rank is the 
 august, but purely decorative and ceremonial one of 
 Colonel-Marshal of the Prussian Court, a title in¬ 
 vented in his honour. He could call himself Court 
 Brewer besides, if he desired, for an advertising 
 legend spread far and wide relates that “Fiirstenberg 
 Beer”—the product of His Serene Highness’ 
 brewery in the Black Forest—is “the special table 
 drink of His Majesty the Kaiser and King.” 
 
 The Kaiser’s fondness for Prince Fiirstenberg is 
 sometimes ascribed to the fact that the Prince is 
 a captain of industry on a gigantic scale. In 
 association with a distant cousin of His Majesty, 
 Prince Christian Kraft zu Hohenlohe-Oehringen, 
 Prince Fiirstenberg heads a combination disposing 
 over resources aggregating $500,000,000 of capital. 
 The partnership has been christened “The Princes 
 Trust,” for its octopus-like ramifications are com¬ 
 parable to the colossal communities of interest 
 which the late Mr. Pierpont Morgan and the other 
 money-kings of Wall Street have made famous. 
 The Princes Trust is a force in the German finan¬ 
 cial world, and its exalted connections make it a 
 power to be reckoned with when it inaugurates one 
 of its periodical campaigns of conquest. Prince 
 Furstenberg’s personal fortune has been estimated 
 at $100,000,000; Prince Hohenlohe-Oehringen’s at 
 
 28 
 
PRINCE FURSTENBERG 
 
 $50,000,000. Five years ago their various interests 
 were pooled and have since expanded to incalculable 
 dimensions. To-day the Trust owns or controls 
 hotels-de-luxe, department-stores, theatres, restau¬ 
 rants and omnibus lines in Berlin and Hamburg, 
 vast coal-briquette, zinc and potash mines in 
 Rhineland and Silesia, sanatoria and gambling- 
 palaces in Madeira, tens of thousands of acres of 
 farming and forest lands in Germany and Austria, 
 and a great realty and building syndicate in Berlin. 
 Overseas, the Trust’s activities find outlet in the 
 ownership of the German Palestine Bank, with 
 important railway and commercial concessions in 
 the Holy Land, and it wrested control of the Ger¬ 
 man Levant Line from influential shipping interests 
 at Hamburg. The first check encountered by the 
 Princes Trust in its all-conquering career was its 
 recent failure to secure a charter for converting 
 Emden, on the North Sea, into a great emigrant 
 harbour, from which it was proposed to establish a 
 Transatlantic steamship service to rival the rich 
 business long monopolised by the Hamburg-Ameri- 
 can and North German Lloyd. The hand of 
 Herr Alfred Ballin, the Shipping King, another 
 friend of the Kaiser, was seen in the rebuff adminis¬ 
 tered to the Princes’ designs on Emden. For the 
 nonce it looked as if Fiirstenberg’s influence with 
 his Imperial chum was no longer omnipotent. 
 
 Prince Furstenberg owns allegiance to no fewer 
 than four different monarchies—Prussia, Austria, 
 Wurtemberg and Baden—and holds hereditary 
 
 29 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 seats in the House of Peers of each of them. Fifty 
 years old and a Roman Catholic, his unique inter¬ 
 national status, colossal wealth and royal connections 
 make him one of the most remarkable and potent 
 figures in contemporary Europe. 
 
 A striking mixture of romantic medievalism and 
 modern progressiveness, Prince Furstenberg is very 
 much a man after the Kaiser’s heart. Soldier, poet, 
 artist, musician, sportsman and archaeologist, he 
 presents the kaleidoscopic nature surest of endearing 
 itself to the versatile William. Unknown to the 
 country at large ten years ago, the Prince, still 
 called “Max” by his comrades of former days in 
 Prague and Vienna, has made his blunt personality 
 and unselfish counsel so invaluable to Emperor 
 William that there is now hardly an important act 
 of statecraft to which the Kaiser commits himself 
 without the advice of the friend with whom His 
 Majesty exchanges the intimate and affectionate 
 German greeting of Du. It speaks volumes for 
 Prince Fiirstenberg’s astuteness and qualities of 
 self-effacement that he has succeeded in remaining 
 effectually behind the scenes. No one ever catches 
 a glimpse of him in the limelight. His strength 
 with the Kaiser is based primarily on his incor¬ 
 rigible habit of telling His Majesty the brutal 
 truth, and dealing with him in a spirit of frank 
 outspokenness no mere subject-counsellor would 
 dare employ. 
 
 Prince Fiirstenberg was born at Lana, in 
 Bohemia, in 1863, the scion of an ancient noble 
 
 30 
 
PRINCE FURSTENBERG 
 
 house which proudly traces its lineage back to the 
 twelfth century and to one of Emperor Charle¬ 
 magne’s paladins. The Furstenbergs of the early 
 Middle Ages lived in the Black Forest. They re¬ 
 ceived the rank of Princes from Emperor Franz I. 
 in 1753. Generation after generation of them pro¬ 
 duced brilliant statesmen and soldiers, so that the 
 present Prince is not departing from family tradi¬ 
 tions in serving at the confidential elbow of a Kaiser. 
 
 Graduated from the aristocratic Rhine university 
 of Bonn, where Emperor William studied, Prince 
 Fiirstenberg passed his early life in Vienna and 
 Prague, and on the family’s various estates, gratify¬ 
 ing a passion for hunting and other tastes of his 
 caste. Inheriting seats in the upper chambers 
 of Austria, Prussia, Wurtemberg and Baden, the 
 Prince interested himself actively in politics before 
 he was thirty. In 1892 he attracted attention to 
 himself by a stirring speech in the Reichsrat 
 advocating German nationalism in Austria. Later 
 he became vice-president of the Austrian House of 
 Peers and one of the recognised political leaders of 
 the monarchy. As head of the Constitutionalists 
 or German-Austrian Liberals, he never misses an 
 opportunity of espousing the claims of Austro- 
 Germans, especially the Bohemian element, from 
 which he himself is sprung. 
 
 In 1896, through the death of his cousin, Karl 
 Egon, Prince Maximilian Egon became the titular 
 head of the House of Fiirstenberg and holder of 
 its enormous estates. Comparatively poor before, 
 
 3i 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 the Prince was now enabled to play a glittering role 
 in aristocratic society in both Germany and Austria. 
 His castles at Lana and Prague, his town houses 
 in Vienna and Karlsruhe, and his wondrously 
 magnificent and extensive shooting preserves and 
 estates at Donau-Eschingen, in the Black Forest, 
 at the source of the Blue Danube,, became the 
 scenes of sumptuous hospitality, outrivailing the 
 entertainments of Kings and Emperors. Several 
 sojourns a year at Donau-Eschingen figure regu¬ 
 larly in the itinerary of the Kaiser. It is there he 
 likes most to seek rest and relaxation. There he 
 interned himself, surrounded by his nearest and 
 dearest, while the Fatherland was fuming over the 
 indiscretions of the Daily Telegraph interview. 
 There, comforted by the sympathetic counsel of 
 Prince “Max,” he remained in congenial seclusion 
 till the storm of the nation’s wrath had spent its 
 force. 
 
 Prince Furstenberg usurped in the Kaiser’s 
 esteem the place of honour formerly held by Prince 
 Philip zu Eulenburg, the deposed and disgraced 
 courtier-diplomat who formerly headed the “inner 
 round table” of William II. When Prince Eulen- 
 burg’s sun had set, in consequence of the Harden 
 exposures, and the Squire of Liebenberg was ban¬ 
 ished from the Imperial entourage, Prince Fiirsten- 
 berg stepped naturally into the fallen favourite’s 
 place. His rise in power and influence from that 
 moment forth was meteoric. 
 
 In November, 1907, while the Kaiser was recuper- 
 32 
 
PRINCE FtJRSTENBERG 
 
 ating in England, the German newspapers published 
 the laconic announcement that Prince Fiirstenberg 
 had left for Castle Highcliffe at the Emperor’s 
 telegraphic summons. German political life at the 
 moment was electric with fear and trembling as 
 the result of the Moltke-Eulenburg scandals. Prince 
 Billow’s Chancellorship was tottering under dis¬ 
 tracting parliamentary difficulty. Fiirstenberg was 
 heralded as the coming man. It was asserted with 
 positiveness that the Kaiser had invited him to 
 Highcliffe, to urge him to hurl himself into the 
 breach and take the Chancellorship from which 
 Biilow was threatening to resign. The Prince 
 resisted all entreaties, but returned from England 
 an irrevocable factor in German high politics for 
 all time. 
 
 Since Highcliffe, Prince Fiirstenberg has seldom 
 been missing from the Emperor’s entourage on 
 important occasions. He helped the Kaiser christen 
 the new German Navy at Wilhelmshaven in March, 
 1908, when His Majesty’s first Dreadnought, the 
 Nassau, was launched. A week later Fiirstenberg 
 accompanied the Emperor to Heligoland to inspect 
 the initial preparations for converting that crum¬ 
 bling isle into a Teuton Gibraltar. A fortnight 
 afterwards the Prince joined the Kaiser at Corfu, 
 which they visit together almost annually. Each 
 year, after the Ionian sun has browned the Imperial 
 countenance for a few weeks, it is at Prince Fiir- 
 stenberg’s glorious shooting-box at Donau-Eschin- 
 gen that William II. tarries before resuming 
 
 33 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 Imperial duties at Berlin. In addition to his other 
 endearing qualities, Prince Fiirstenberg is a capital 
 story-teller and keen wit. Some of the Kaiser’s 
 happiest hours are spent listening to “Maxchen’s” 
 inimitable yarn spinning, amusingly interlarded 
 with Austrian and South German dialect. 
 
 In his wife, who was a Countess von Schonborn- 
 Buchheim, one of a trio of Austrian sisters cele¬ 
 brated for their beauty, Prince Fiirstenberg has an 
 able lieutenant in the unofficial but responsible post 
 of the Kaiser’s best friend. 
 
V 
 
 GWINNER 
 
 I T is natural that the race which produced the 
 Rothschilds should be richly endowed with 
 financial genius. Germany of to-day is gen¬ 
 erously supplied with men worthy of the traditions 
 of the Five Frankforters. Berlin is not the world- 
 money Mecca the South German metropolis was 
 in the Napoleonic era—the Kaiser’s capital has 
 latterly been almost more of a borrower than a 
 lender—but her importance in the universe of high 
 finance is great and growing. The firmness or 
 weakness of the Berlin money market and Stock 
 Exchange, though not yet of the barometric influ¬ 
 ence of Wall Street, is nevertheless a factor which 
 London, New York and Paris require increasingly 
 to take into account. It would no longer be possible 
 for the Bank of England, J. P. Morgan & Co., and 
 the Credit Lyonnais to parcel out the earth between 
 them. Wherever they turned, they would find a 
 solid, assertive German institution in the field, de¬ 
 manding a place in the financial sun. Its name is 
 the Deutsche Bank. 
 
 Germany has nine great banks with capital 
 ranging from $15,000,000 to $50,000,000 apiece, 
 and several private concerns of international renown 
 
 35 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 and immense resources like the Mendelssohns and 
 Bleichroeders. The list of financial luminaries of 
 the first magnitude include such men as Carl 
 Fiirstenberg, Paul von Schwabach, Paul Mankie- 
 witz, Baron Oppenheim of Cologne, the Speyers of 
 Frankfort, the Warburgs of Hamburg, Eugen 
 Gutman and Arthur Salomonsohn, each a host in 
 himself, and the representative of enormous inter¬ 
 ests. The leadership, however, belongs by common 
 consent to the Deutsche Bank. It is from its vast 
 counting-house in Berlin that the conquering march 
 of German capital in two hemispheres is mainly 
 directed. It is the Reichsbank, Imperial Germany’s 
 central bank of issue, which regulates the discount 
 rate and keeps the currency mobile and liquid, but 
 it is the Deutsche Bank which pioneers and finances 
 German enterprise oversea. At home its power 
 is comparable only to that of the Government itself. 
 With an annual turnover which has risen since the 
 Bank’s foundation from $60,000,000 to $32,500,- 
 000,000, it has come to wield a mighty influence 
 over German economic life. 
 
 Though he himself denies it, Arthur von Gwinner, 
 the type of the German financier of the period, is the 
 presiding genius of the institution. It seems more 
 than an alphabetical coincidence that his name heads 
 the list of the Deutsche Bank’s directors. Once in 
 a while a new director is elected, but there is appar¬ 
 ently an unwritten by-law providing that nobody 
 should ever be chosen whose name begins with a 
 letter in advance of G. Gwinner describes himself 
 
 36 
 
GWINNER 
 
 as “a simple member of the managerial board.” 
 Germany and the world, nevertheless, associate his 
 name with most of the big strokes the Deutsche 
 Bank periodically accomplishes. When the Kaiser, 
 as he has more than once done, tries to persuade 
 Gwinner to enter the Cabinet and assume either 
 the Prussian Ministership of Finance, or the 
 Secretaryship of the Imperial Treasury, His Majesty 
 directs his appeal to the man looked upon as the 
 premier banker of the realm. Gwinner is an ardent 
 patriot, but, like Ballin, he thinks he can render 
 the Fatherland more effective service by sticking to 
 his last than by taking office. 
 
 The Deutsche Bank may be called twin to the 
 Empire. It was established in 1870, almost at the 
 very hour Bismarck and Moltke went to war with 
 France. No other institution’s rise has been so 
 coincident with the economic development of 
 Germany itself. The Deutsche Bank’s year-by-year 
 growth from small beginnings to its present dimen¬ 
 sions is Germany in composite. Industry in the 
 Fatherland is more intimately allied to, and inter¬ 
 woven with, banking capital than anywhere else in 
 the world. To an inordinate extent the industrial 
 fabric rests on credit. In many cases the banks 
 exercise autocratic domination over the manu¬ 
 facturing, mining and shipping trades. Vast blocks 
 of their capital are tied up in purely industrial 
 undertakings. Foreign financiers are sceptical of 
 the soundness of this interlocking alliance between 
 banks and industry, but it has justified itself to 
 
 37 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 the extent of making possible Germany’s present- 
 day formidableness in the world’s markets. 
 
 The founder of the Deutsche Bank was the late 
 Georg von Siemens, whose name will be indelibly 
 inscribed in the inspiring story of Germany’s vault 
 to weltmacht. He was a member of the family 
 which has given the German electrical industry 
 international fame. It was vouchsafed Siemens’ 
 far-seeing policy to make the Deutsche Bank the 
 first institution to carry German capital abroad and 
 stake out Germany’s ambitious claims for a share of 
 oversea commerce. It was he who secured the 
 concession for the Anatolian railways in 1888, which 
 were to blaze the way for German supremacy in 
 what now remains of the Turkish Empire. Arthur 
 Gwinner was his pupil and understudy. When 
 Siemens was removed from the scene in 1901, 
 Gwinner became his successor. In March, 1903, 
 Gwinner obtained the Baghdad Railway concession 
 from Sultan Abdul Hamid, and, in the capacity 
 of President of the Anatolian and Baghdad Railway 
 Companies, assumed supreme control of both prop¬ 
 erties. To-day they represent a German invest¬ 
 ment of $80,000,000. The Anatolian lines begin 
 at Haidar Pasha, on the Asiatic side of Con¬ 
 stantinople, and run to Eskishehir, where there is 
 a bifurcation eastwards to Angora—Ankyra of the 
 Ancients. St. Paul’s epistle to the Galatians was 
 addressed to Ankyra, the capital of Galatia. From 
 Eskishehir the railway runs south-easterly to Konia 
 —Ikonium of the Ancients, capital of the Seljuk 
 
 38 
 
GWINNER 
 
 dynasty which preceded the Osman house now 
 enthroned at the Golden Horn. It was from Konia 
 that Cicero, banished, wrote to a Roman friend that 
 there were more asses in the country than men. 
 Some day, if Gwinner has his way, there will be 
 more Germans there than Turks. The Anatolian 
 lines have a total length of six hundred and fifty 
 miles. The Baghdad system, which begins where 
 the Anatolian Railway ends, is to extend from 
 Konia across country to the Persian Gulf. Three 
 hundred and fifty miles of it are already built and 
 opened to traffic; something over 625 are under 
 construction, or to be constructed, as far as 
 Baghdad. A branch is to be built to Alexandretta, 
 on the Mediterranean, where Alexander the Great 
 overwhelmed the Persian Emperor in the battle on 
 the banks of the River Issus, 333 b. c. Construc¬ 
 tion between Baghdad and the Persian Gulf is not 
 yet commenced. It is this strip which is the bone 
 of contention between Germany and Great Britain. 
 Germany’s insistence on the right to construct and 
 control the terminal undoubtedly contains the seeds 
 of a grave conflict. Englishmen may be excused 
 for not relishing the spectre of a short cut to India 
 over a trans-European-Asiatic trunk-line, German- 
 owned and German-operated, which reduces the sea- 
 route to India ten days, and might conceivably bring 
 German armies to the gates of Delhi before British 
 Dreadnoughts could reach Bombay. 
 
 Gwinner, it may be assumed, is not building the 
 Baghdad Railway for the purposes of the German 
 
 39 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 General Staff. What chiefly keeps him awake of 
 nights is how to extract dividends from it for the 
 Deutsche Bank, and how best to promote the 
 golden opportunities which await the strategists of 
 the German trading army in the Near East. He 
 made a poetic confession of the prophetic ideals 
 he cherishes at Baghdad by quoting Faust at the 
 conclusion of a striking article in the Nineteenth 
 Century for June, 1909:— 
 
 “To many millions space I thus should give, 
 
 Though not secure, yet free to toil and live; 
 
 Green fields and fertile; men, with cattle blent. 
 
 Upon the newest earth would dwell content. 
 
 Settled forthwith upon the firm-based hill, 
 
 Uplifted by a valiant people’s skill; 
 
 Within a land like Paradise.” 
 
 Like all the big captains of German business, 
 Gwinner believes that the $375,000,000 or 
 $400,000,000 a year which Germany spends on the 
 upkeep of her Army and Navy—she is spending 
 over $575,000,000 in 1913—is not too high a price 
 to pay for the defence of national honour or for an 
 insurance premium on a foreign trade aggregating 
 roundly $5,000,000,000 per annum. If Gwinner 
 were Chancellor of the Exchequer, it seems fairly 
 clear that German finances would not be distin¬ 
 guished by the chronic chaos in which they have 
 long wallowed. His maiden speech in the House 
 of Peers, to which the Kaiser elevated him in 1910, 
 consisted of a fearless and sweeping attack on the 
 administration of Prussian finances. He advocated 
 
 40 
 
GWINNER 
 
 the policy of State Railway loans as the most 
 obvious and legitimate source of extraordinary 
 national revenue. Taking the Pennsylvania Rail¬ 
 way as an example, he declared that if that great 
 system were conducted on the lines of Prussia’s 
 richly productive State railways, it would long 
 since have gone into the hands of a receiver. 
 Baron von Rheinbaben, the Prussian Minister of 
 Finance, retired from office shortly after Gwinner’s 
 onslaught. 
 
 Gwinner sniffed banking and finance from the 
 cradle, for his birthplace was Frankfort-on-the- 
 Main, at the time—1856—still very much of an 
 international money centre. His father was a 
 distinguished jurist and intimate friend of Schopen¬ 
 hauer and was the executor of the philosopher’s 
 estate, as well as his biographer. He is still alive, 
 and in 1909 received from the Kaiser the patent of 
 hereditary nobility. It is popularly understood 
 that the distinction was meant to be conferred in 
 reality on the son, who became entitled simul¬ 
 taneously to be known henceforth as von Gwinner. 
 The year 1884 found young Gwinner in Government 
 service as German Consul at Madrid. In 1885 he 
 contracted a matrimonial alliance with one of the 
 leading financial houses of Europe and America 
 by marrying the daughter of Philipp Speyer of 
 Frankfort-on-the-Main. Three years later he estab¬ 
 lished the private banking-house of Arthur Gwinner 
 & Co., in Berlin, remaining at its head until 1894, 
 when he was invited by Georg von Siemens to join 
 
 41 
 
 \ 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 the directorate of the Deutsche Bank. He had early 
 opportunity to prove his capacity, when in 1896 
 the Deutsche Bank undertook the reorganization 
 of the Northern Pacific Railway on behalf of 
 European shareholders. That astutely executed 
 transaction, from which investors eventually 
 emerged without loss, was carried out by Siemens 
 and his able young lieutenant, in conjunction with 
 Henry Villard of New York. It was the first 
 feather in Gwinner’s cap, destined to be garnished 
 with many. 
 
 Gwinner’s talent is essentially for big things. 
 He is a banker of large conceptions. The Deutsche 
 Bank owns the Berlin underground and elevated 
 railway system, but it is not in Gwinner’s depart^ 
 ment. He deals only with railways calculable 
 in thousands of miles, like the Northern Pacific and 
 Baghdad systems. Plis latest project in monumental 
 finance is the scheme to create a State monopoly 
 in petroleum to break the autocratic power of the 
 Standard Oil Company in Germany. The Deutsche 
 Bank is interested in oil properties in Rumania, 
 and Gwinner is assisting the Imperial Government 
 to effect a nationalization of the traffic in petroleum 
 as the only effective means of crushing Rockefel- 
 lerism in the Fatherland. Gwinner is an uncom¬ 
 monly plain speaker. Such truths as he hurled at 
 the Minister of Finance in the Prussian Herren- 
 haus were unique in German parliamentary practice. 
 He had no compunction once in saying to the 
 American Chamber of Commerce in Berlin, in the 
 
 42 
 
GWINNER 
 
 presence of the American Ambassador and a dozen 
 captains of American industry gathered round a 
 banquet board, that the United States currency 
 system bordered on a travesty. He is the type of 
 the idealist and scholar in business, a class more 
 numerous in Germany than anywhere in the world. 
 Gwinner speaks English, French and Spanish with 
 the utmost fluency. He can joke in our language 
 with the extempore facility of Mr. Plowden or 
 Chauncey M. Depew. He has a marvellous memory 
 and quotes Shakespeare and Moliere with the same 
 ease as Goethe and Schiller, whom he knows by 
 heart. Once he returned a document to a subor¬ 
 dinate at the Deutsche Bank with a marginal 
 reference to Polonius’ homily to Laertes on the 
 relative advantages of borrowing and lending. “We 
 don’t borrow too much,” he once declared in the 
 Prussian Parliament. “We borrow too little. The 
 thing is to borrow right. Talent is necessary for 
 everything, but borrowing requires genius.” 
 
 The great Bank in which this art connoisseur, 
 music-lover and book-devourer plays a dominating 
 role is capitalized at $50,000,000 and has a reserve 
 fund of $27,500,000. Its deposits total between 
 $375, 000 , 00 ° and $400,000,000. It maintains 
 branches in London, Constantinople and Brussels 
 and in eleven German cities outside Berlin, as well 
 as agencies in all the principal centres of the world. 
 Its staff exceeds six thousand. World-wide are its 
 ramifications. It owns the Banco Aleman Trans¬ 
 atlantic, with a sphere of influence embracing the 
 
 43 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 Argentine, Chile, Peru, Bolivia, the Brazils, Mexico 
 and Spain, and controls the German Overseas Elec¬ 
 tric Company of Buenos Aires which furnishes light 
 and power in the leading cities of the Argentine, 
 Chile and Uruguay. As for Germany itself, there 
 is hardly a single important industrial corporation in 
 which the Deutsche Bank is not heavily interested. 
 In dozens of them it exercises a dominating voice. 
 From the date of Herr von Gwinner’s connection 
 with the institution, now a matter of nineteen years, 
 the Deutsche Bank has never paid less than ten 
 per cent, dividend. Most of the time it has dis¬ 
 tributed eleven and twelve per cent., and for the 
 last four years twelve and one half per cent. 
 
VI 
 
 PRINCE HENRY OF PRUSSIA 
 
 T O fill the role of a monarch’s brother is fre¬ 
 quently a thankless part. It has been known 
 to be nebulous and decorative, besides, and 
 few have played it worthily. Prince Henry of Prus¬ 
 sia, brother of the Kaiser, is a striking exception to 
 the general rule. No man of the reign has rendered 
 his country more effective service than the Sailor 
 Prince, who, as Inspector-General of the German 
 Navy, is the ranking officer of the proud Armada 
 which flies the Hohenzollern battle-flag. If Grand- 
 Admiral von Tirpitz may be described as the creator 
 of the Kaiser’s fleet, Grand-Admiral Prince Henry 
 may be called its trainer. Commander-in-Chief of 
 the Active Battle Fleet, as the High Seas Fleet of 
 to-day was formerly known, at the moment when it 
 was undergoing conversion into a navy of Dread¬ 
 noughts, Prince Henry was in supreme charge of 
 Germany’s sea forces at the most critical moment 
 of their existence. The arrival of the all-big-gun 
 and Dreadnought-displacement era had effected a 
 complete revolution in the naval practices of the 
 world. Stereotyped canons of construction, strategy 
 and gunnery required to be overhauled and remade. 
 
 45 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 It was under the personal supervision of the Kaiser’s 
 brother that the German Navy rose to the emergency 
 with promptitude and thoroughness and made itself 
 ready, as if overnight, to hold its own in the new 
 conditions of sea warfare. That is why the Admiral 
 Royal, whose pictures so often make him look like 
 a twin of King George or the Czar, holds a place in 
 the affections of his Fatherland almost second to 
 none. Germans have had few national idols since 
 Bismarck. Prince Henry is one of them. 
 
 Thoroughly imbued with the democracy of the 
 sea, with an active career of more than thirty years 
 to his credit, Prince Henry is a sailor-man through 
 and through—an admiral first and a Prince after¬ 
 wards. He has had little time, and less inclination 
 for the luxurious pastimes of his royal estate. The 
 fashions and frivolities of Court life have never 
 appealed to him. His hobby is the sea, and he is 
 happiest when cultivating it. Naval cadet at six¬ 
 teen, when the fleet was little more than a flotilla 
 of nondescript frigates; battleship-captain at thirty, 
 and rear-admiral four years later, 1906 found Prince 
 Henry commander-in-chief of the homogeneous 
 squadrons which the German Admiralty keeps as¬ 
 sembled in home waters as one great sledge-hammer 
 entity, steam up and eager to deliver the decisive 
 blow at the psychological moment. An apostle of 
 the “Ready, aye ready!” policy of perpetual pre¬ 
 paredness for war, he was fitted both by tempera¬ 
 ment and training for the leadership of the Empire’s 
 battle forces afloat. 
 
 46 
 
PRINCE HENRY OF PRUSSIA 1 
 
 Only the most urgent diversions, such as important 
 foreign missions on behalf of the Kaiser, enticed 
 him from his flagship at Kiel, where, too, he has 
 long had his home. A stickler for discipline, his 
 indomitable energy and devotion to duty were at 
 once the marvel and inspiration of the entire Fleet. 
 German naval officers are notoriously the hardest- 
 working—and hardest-worked—in the world. They 
 had a constant example in Prince Henry. He took 
 a deep interest in the men behind the guns and the 
 unseen heroes of the hold. Regardless of personal 
 comfort he participated regularly in the long 
 practice cruises of the High Seas Fleet in and out 
 of season, and he is to-day given chief credit for 
 the strategic and tactical skill which the Kaiser’s 
 battle squadrons have attained. After Prince 
 Henry hoisted his farewell signal as Commander-in- 
 Chief of the Fleet three years ago, he was rowed 
 ashore from his flagship by a crew of lieutenants— 
 a pretty and affectionate tribute to the esteem in 
 which the Navy cherishes him. 
 
 Prince Henry is a firm disciple of his brother’s 
 celebrated creed, that Germany’s future lies on the 
 water. A man of initiative and fearless independ¬ 
 ence, he has on more than one occasion had lively 
 disagreements with the Kaiser on naval affairs. 
 But on the big essential idea of the “bitter need” 
 of Teuton sea power, they, like the rest of modern 
 Germany, are indissolubly one. As the protector of 
 the Navy League, Prince Henry has been actively 
 identified with the propaganda by which the inner- 
 
 47 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 most recesses of the Fatherland have been converted 
 to naval enthusiasm. 
 
 The Sailor Prince, now in his fifty-first year, is 
 the Kaiser’s junior by three years and a half. They 
 were at school together in Cassel between 1875 
 and 1877, the Emperor proceeding to the University 
 at Bonn, and Prince Henry to the Naval Academy 
 at Kiel. Prince Henry was a favourite of his 
 lamented parents, Emperor and Empress Frederick. 
 
 An American ambassador, during the fateful 
 100-day-reign, once spoke to Emperor Frederick in 
 admiration of Crown Prince, now Kaiser William, 
 to whom the diplomat had been presented the day 
 before. “Yes,” responded the lovable Frederick, 
 “Wilhelm’s a fine lad, but you should see my boy 
 Heinrich!” It has been said that Prince Henry 
 inherits his Liebenswiirdigkeit from his father, and 
 his love of the sea from his English mother. When, 
 as a cadet of sixteen, he was sent on a two-year trip 
 around the world in the frigate Prince Adalbert, his 
 mother, then Crown Princess Victoria, was much 
 concerned for his safety. Entirely against the 
 cadet’s will, the Crown Princess begged the old 
 Emperor to excuse her sailor-boy from the long 
 cruise aboard the frail frigate. Emperor William I., 
 with his uncompromising ideas of soldierly duty, 
 would not listen to the maternal appeal. He declared 
 that the Sailor Prince must face the ordeals of his 
 appointed career like the humblest middy in the 
 Fleet. Before he reached home shores, two years 
 later, Prince Henry had weathered a typhoon in 
 
 48 
 
PRINCE HENRY OF PRUSSIA 
 
 the Bay of Bengal, and received his baptismal 
 experience of the trials and terrors of his life 
 profession. 
 
 Prince Henry’s first important flag assignment 
 came when he was sent to the Far East in 1897 as 
 admiral in command of the Second German Cruiser 
 Division. On his departure from Kiel the Kaiser 
 delivered an amazing bon voyage speech. “If any¬ 
 one dares,” he said, “to interfere with our good right, 
 ride in with the mailed fist!” The depth of Prince 
 Henry’s veneration for his brother—a marked trait 
 of his many-sided nature—was manifested by his 
 hardly less remarkable reply. “Neither glory nor 
 laurels attract me,” he declared. “My one desire 
 is to proclaim the gospel of Your Majesty’s sacred 
 person in foreign parts.” 
 
 Prince Henry’s flag was destined to flutter amid 
 stirring times in Eastern waters. Germany’s occupa¬ 
 tion of Kiau-Chau, the price China had to pay for 
 the murder of missionaries engaged in converting 
 the benighted sons of Confucius to the creed of 
 Martin Luther, took place under the Prince’s 
 auspices. American acquisition of the Philippines 
 soon followed, and after Admiral von Diederichs’ 
 tactlessness at Manila nearly embroiled Germany 
 in war with the United States, Prince Henry in¬ 
 herited his command with the rank of vice-admiral. 
 
 America’s ruffled susceptibilities gave the Kaiser’s 
 brother opportunity to reveal diplomatic talent of 
 a high order, which has meantime often been invoked 
 by the German Government. He had not been 
 
 49 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 back from the troubled East long when he was 
 dispatched on his famous mission to the United 
 States in 1902. Sent there ostensibly to officiate 
 at a launch of a racing-yacht for the Kaiser, Prince 
 Henry’s trip had for its underlying object the 
 inauguration of what has since been known as 
 the Kaiser’s “American policy.” Germans, who 
 constitutionally view with alarm too intimate con¬ 
 tact of the ermine with the homespun, were filled 
 with trepidation as to how Hohenzollern dignity 
 would emerge from shoulder-brushing with Ameri¬ 
 can democracy. Prince Henry himself had few 
 qualms on that score. At a banquet in New York he 
 toasted the leaders of the American press as men 
 who hold the rank of commanding-generals in his 
 own country—a strong dose for Prussian Junkers, 
 who look upon journalists as intellectual microbes. 
 When a Chicago newsboy, as His Royal Highness 
 of Germany drove through the streets of the Windy 
 City, yelled at him, “Hello, Hank! How are you?” 
 the brother of the Supreme War Lord smiled from 
 ear to ear, and replied: “I’m all right! How are 
 you?” That was the spirit in which the Sailor 
 Prince met unconventional Uncle Sam. That is 
 why his visit was a success, and why it laid deep 
 and well the foundations of the Kaiser’s “American 
 policy.” On semi-diplomatic visits to the Courts 
 of England, Russia and Japan, and on minor mis¬ 
 sions to half a dozen European Courts and Govern¬ 
 ments, Prince Henry has signally distinguished him¬ 
 self. 
 
 50 
 
PRINCE HENRY OF PRUSSIA 
 
 Next to the sea, sport is Prince Henry’s ruling 
 passion. He has been a pioneer in almost every 
 form of outdoor activity, a cult comparatively new 
 to Germany, but one in which she is already making 
 heroic efforts to shine at the Berlin Olympiad of 
 1916. Prince Henry is huntsman, skater, swimmer 
 and golfer, plays a strong game of tennis, is a dar¬ 
 ing tobogganist and sails his own schooner with the 
 skill of an America Cup skipper. He has been the 
 chief ally of the Kaiser in elevating Kiel Week to 
 the dignity of one of the world’s premier regattas. 
 One of the early adherents of motoring in Germany, 
 he has himself long been an expert driver, and 
 competes in the annual “Prinz-Heinrich” cross¬ 
 country run of the Imperial Automobile Club, of 
 which he is honorary president. He knows his car 
 from top to bottom, and is a convincing figure, 
 rubber-clad, tinkering at his own engine, or fitting 
 a tyre like a chauffeur-mechanic born. He finds 
 time to further the cause of the German motor trade, 
 too, and has latterly made personal propaganda for 
 the exclusive use of German petrol, and for the 
 increased use of motor cars. He discovered that 
 while there was a car to every two hundred and 
 forty-nine inhabitants in England, and one to every 
 four hundred and forty-one in France, only one out 
 of nine hundred and twenty-seven of his own coun¬ 
 trymen was an automobilist. He preached a per¬ 
 suasive sermon on the joys and advantages of motor¬ 
 ing, which is destined to have tangible effect. 
 
 Always up to date, Prince Henry is an enthu- 
 51 
 
VII 
 
 COUNT ZEPPELIN 
 
 “A" i HE greatest German of the Twentieth 
 h Century.” Such is the proud title con- 
 
 JL ferred on Count von Zeppelin by Em¬ 
 
 peror William II. in a burst of impulsive eloquence 
 five years ago, when the septuagenarian aeronaut 
 alighted at His Majesty’s feet from a Zeppelin 
 airship. At first, men read Imperial hyperbole into 
 the Kaiser’s exclamation in the same spirit as they 
 had scoffed for sixteen years at all Count Zeppelin’s 
 dauntless attempts at the conquest of the air. To¬ 
 day, with a fleet of Zeppelins in being, carrying pas¬ 
 sengers serenely and safely to and fro across the 
 country, comprising an integral part of the Father¬ 
 land’s military “Watch on the Rhine,” and serving 
 as the eagle-eyes of the Navy on the North Sea, 
 the sceptics have quit their sneering and arrived 
 at the conclusion that Zeppelin, indeed, has taken 
 his place among the Immortals. 
 
 Count Zeppelin will be seventy-five years old in 
 July, 1913. He was seventy when Fame, tardily 
 and reluctantly, shook him by the hand and said, 
 “Well done!” He had wooed her long and des¬ 
 perately before her smiles were lavished upon 
 him irrevocably. The scroll of the world’s inventors 
 
COUNT ZEPPELIN 
 
 holds many a tale of blighted hopes and indomi¬ 
 table aspirations, but none of its drama outrivals 
 the story of Count Zeppelin’s triumph over failure 
 and disaster. No man ever climbed to greatness 
 over obstacles more relentless. Few have survived 
 such blows as Fate rained on his snow-white head 
 mercilessly for twenty years. Those were the con¬ 
 siderations which moved the Kaiser to ordain Zep¬ 
 pelin a national idol. 
 
 To-day one no longer risks a reputation for con¬ 
 servatism by opining that Zeppelin airships are only 
 on the threshold of their ultimate possibilities. They 
 have already given Germany the command of the 
 air. The feats of aeroplanes, in point of speed 
 and spectacular achievements, are still unrivalled, 
 but heavier-than-air craft in other respects is as far 
 behind Zeppelins as the dragon-kite of Lilienthal 
 was inferior to the biplane of Wilbur and Orville 
 Wright. To travel a day and a night without inter¬ 
 mediate landing, through rain and snow and wind, 
 with two score passengers and crew, is child’s play 
 for the Imperators and Dreadnoughts of the heav¬ 
 ens. Fifty miles an hour in favouring weather has 
 become only an average speed; the carrying of four 
 and one half tons of burden—explosives, if neces¬ 
 sary, mere freight of peace, if desired—a demon¬ 
 strated possibility. Zeppelins have crossed and re¬ 
 crossed the North Sea and the Baltic in single non¬ 
 stop flights, much of the time in the teeth of hostile 
 blasts. Equipped with searchlights, wireless teleg¬ 
 raphy, bomb-tubes and machine-guns, the aerial 
 
 55 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 leviathans which carry the battle-flags of the Ger¬ 
 man Army and Navy have executed a dozen flights, 
 the equivalent of trips of recognizance along the 
 entire frontier of France or the coasts of Great 
 Britain. The enactment of Germany’s first Aerial 
 Fleet Law, which provides for a regular building 
 programme of Zeppelins for the Army and Navy, 
 is the Empire's crowning acknowledgment of Count 
 Zeppelin’s greatness. 
 
 Bom at Constance, on the placid inland sea which 
 washes the shores of Germany and Switzerland, and 
 which was destined to be the scene of his triumphant 
 labours, the son of a Wurtemberg Court official, 
 Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin devoted his early 
 manhood to the profession of his caste, the Army. 
 A lieutenant of cavalry, 1863 found him, at the age 
 of twenty-five, doing duty as Wiirtemberg’s military 
 attache with the Union Army in the American War 
 of the Rebellion. Proceeding directly to the army of 
 the Mississippi, where he found a German “48-er,” 
 the late Carl Schurz, commanding a brigade, Lieut, 
 von Zeppelin evinced an irresistible fondness for 
 getting into the fray in some capacity more thrill¬ 
 ing than that of an innocent bystander. A few 
 months later, at the sanguinary engagement of Fred- 
 ricksburg, the young German cavalryman narrowly 
 escaped falling into the enemy’s hands as a conse¬ 
 quence of a too eager determination to be where 
 the sabres were thickest. A swift mount and dar¬ 
 ing horsemanship were all that saved him from a 
 Confederate prison. 
 
 56 
 
COUNT ZEPPELIN 
 
 It was his service with the United States Army 
 which gave Count Zeppelin the first chance to 
 gratify his inborn longing for aeronautics. His 
 initial ascent was made in a captive balloon sent up 
 by the Federal corps to which he was attached, for 
 the purpose of spying upon the Confederate lines 
 beyond. He alighted enthusiastic over his exhila¬ 
 rating experience, and received permission to make 
 regular ascents. Germany’s “future in the air” was 
 born in Dixie. 
 
 Count Zeppelin returned to his Fatherland just 
 in time for another war—the Prussian campaign of 
 1866 against Austria. He went through that short, 
 sharp and decisive struggle from start to finish. 
 But it was not until the cataclysmic struggle against 
 France that the intrepid young balloonist-trooper 
 was destined to carve his name indelibly in German 
 history. On July 24th, 1870, a few hours after 
 the declaration of war, Count Zeppelin, with four 
 other young officers and seven horsemen, was de¬ 
 tailed to make a brazen reconnoitring dash into 
 French territory which had not yet been invaded 
 by German soldiery. With that devil-may-care 
 determination which has proved the keynote of his 
 life, Zeppelin led his little column boldly into the 
 enemy’s country. The news of their invasion spread 
 like wildfire through the region in which French 
 troops were massing to meet Moltke’s oncoming 
 legions. Orders were given to take the German 
 riders dead or alive. Tearing like mad through a 
 frontier village, Zeppelin’s horse was wounded by 
 
 57 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 a lancer, who “tackled” him while both were riding 
 at full speed. Zeppelin cut his antagonist down with 
 a sabre, and, leaving him prostrate, jumped on his 
 assailant’s horse and made off. Through Wiessen- 
 burg, Worth and a dozen other towns and hamlets 
 the little German column flew. At Reichshof a 
 ^squadron of chasseurs barred the way. Lieut. 
 Winsloe was shot down—the first German to fall in 
 the great campaign. Then two other officers and 
 all seven of Zeppelin’s dragoons were surrounded 
 and compelled to surrender. Only Zeppelin him¬ 
 self escaped—again with the aid of a captured 
 French mount. For hours troops scoured the coun¬ 
 tryside for trace of the dare-devil young cavalry¬ 
 man, only finally to convince themselves that he 
 had reached German soil again safe and sound, the 
 bearer of vital information concerning the enemy’s 
 dispositions. Count Zeppelin emerged from the 
 Franco-German campaign a Colonel, and advanced 
 by successive stages to the commandership of a 
 brigade. Later, he commanded a fortress, repre¬ 
 sented Wurtemberg in the Federal Council at Berlin, 
 and in 1891 attained the rank of a general of cav¬ 
 alry, with which he retired. 
 
 Count Zeppelin, long a theoretical student of the 
 science of airmanship, began to devote himself 
 actively to its pursuit in 1892. Though no longer 
 young, he proceeded to equip himself with practical 
 knowledge by courses of apprenticeship in aero¬ 
 nautics, mechanics, electricity, sailmaking and mete¬ 
 orology. Peering sagaciously into the distant 
 
 58 
 
COUNT ZEPPELIN 
 
 future, he described his aims at that time in these 
 prophetic terms: 
 
 “I intend to build a vessel which will be able to 
 travel to places which cannot be approached—or 
 only with great difficulty—by other means of trans¬ 
 port; to undiscovered coasts or interiors; in a 
 straight line across land and water where ships 
 are to be sought for; from one fleet station or army 
 to another carrying persons or dispatches; for obser¬ 
 vations of the movements of hostile fleets or armies, 
 not for active participation in the operations of 
 actual warfare. My dirigible balloon must be able 
 to travel several days without renewing provisions, 
 gas or fuel. It must travel quickly enough to reach 
 a certain goal in a given number of hours or days, 
 and must possess sufficient rigidity and non-inflam¬ 
 mability to ascend, travel and descend under ordi¬ 
 nary conditions.” 
 
 This was a pretty tall order, in the estimation 
 of the military and scientific experts. A roar of 
 benevolent mirth, mingled with pity for the vagaries 
 of a once stable mind, reverberated over the country. 
 
 “Zeppelin’s in his dotage,” said his friends. “A 
 crank, a crazy inventor,” was the less charitable 
 observation of foes. “I never pay any attention to 
 hare-brained appeals from visionaries,” wrote a 
 millionaire American newspaper-owner, to whom 
 Zeppelin, in his desperation once offered practically 
 to mortgage his future for a loan of $25,000. But 
 the Count kept on plodding, mindless alike of ridi¬ 
 cule and indifference. His fortune and his family’s 
 
 59 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 gradually vanished. He built, destroyed and re-con¬ 
 structed an acre of models and actual ships, which 
 seemed all right in theory but would not fly. Then 
 his credit, even with admirers and long-time 
 backers, ceased. The Government’s aeronautical 
 experts turned him the cold shoulder. He issued 
 vain appeals through the newspapers, assuring the 
 nation he knew he was on the right track. But the 
 little man who had cut his way through a French 
 army corps was never daunted. Disappointment 
 and failure were habits now. They only spurred 
 him on fresh. By hook and crook, he finally con¬ 
 trived to scrape together enough money to build 
 Zeppelin III., and with it in the summer and 
 autumn of 1907 he made six successful flights—the 
 last one a sensational, epoch-making trip of nearly 
 eight hours, in which over 200 miles were covered. 
 
 The anti-Zeppelin party at Berlin now subsided. 
 Their plight became utter confusion when the 
 Government, convinced at length that Zeppelins 
 had a future, agreed to purchase No. 3, and grant 
 Count Zeppelin an additional $125,000 for further 
 experiments. The Reichstag passed a law per¬ 
 mitting the Count to conduct a national lottery 
 for the raising of still further experimental sinews. 
 Then began a fresh period of bouts with fate, in 
 which Zeppelin was doomed to be worsted times 
 without number. His crowning disaster came in 
 August, 1908, when the great new Zeppelin IV., 
 en route to Lake Constance across country from 
 the north, was wrecked on the plains of Echter- 
 
 60 
 
COUNT ZEPPELIN 
 
 dingen, in Wiirtemberg. Germany, now passion¬ 
 ately aroused to the limitless significance of Zep¬ 
 pelins, grieved over Echterdingen as if some great 
 national catastrophe had torn the nation’s heart¬ 
 strings. An amazing exhibition of public generosity 
 was the result. Within six weeks the Fatherland 
 placed a fund of $1,500,000 at Count Zeppelin’s 
 disposal in order that he might be freed for all 
 time of the financial nightmare which had dogged 
 his career without compassion so many years. The 
 Zeppelin “dockyard” at Friedrichshafen, on Lake 
 Constance, sprang into being. To-day it is a plant 
 capable of turning out Zeppelins of the biggest 
 dimensions at the rate of one a month. Since 
 Echterdingen, half a dozen Zeppelins have suffered 
 the fate of the immortal IV .; but no life has ever 
 been lost in Zeppelin wrecks, which have been due 
 in every case to external causes, frequently care¬ 
 lessness. In the spring of 1909, Zeppelin II., the 
 second of a new type, established for all time the 
 miraculous possibilities dormant in the craft by a 
 continuous thirty-eight-hour journey from Fried¬ 
 richshafen to Saxony and back again to Wiirtem- 
 berg—a circuit of roundly 1,000 miles. 
 
 Of medium height, snow-haired and military in 
 every feature of his well-knit frame, Count Zep¬ 
 pelin, like all men who have fought their way 
 through adversity to glory, is modesty personified. 
 He has been a victim of hero-worshippers for the 
 better part of six years, but they have not turned 
 his head. He lives unobtrusively at Stuttgart when 
 
 61 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 not superintending affairs at Friedrichshafen, fre¬ 
 quently takes the helm of new ships on trial flights, 
 and, like “Bobs,” he does not advertise. The Count 
 was at the wheel last October during the famous 
 maiden cruise of the naval Zeppelin over the North 
 Sea, and still calls the clouds his natural element. 
 Berlin, which would lionise him, seldom sees him. 
 His infrequent visits are strictly on business, for 
 conference with the War Office or Admiralty. He 
 has one child, a daughter, who is married to a 
 Berlin army officer. She has been an active help¬ 
 mate of her widowed father through the long 
 years of his heart-breaking vicissitudes. Herself 
 an intrepid aeronaut, she possesses practical knowl¬ 
 edge of Zeppelins both from the construction and 
 operating standpoints. 
 
 In the evening of his life, so full of restless 
 achievements, Count Zeppelin dreams of still an¬ 
 other field of conquest for his wonder-ships. He 
 means, he says, before he grows old, to explore 
 the unknown regions contiguous to the North Pole. 
 Government and popular support in plenty is be¬ 
 hind the project, which has already advanced be¬ 
 yond the preliminary stage. As for merely crossing 
 an ocean, those of us who have experienced the 
 incomparable thrills of cruising in a Zeppelin, 
 would book our passage to-morrow if we could. 
 And before another decade of our pell-mell history 
 is written, I verily believe we shall. 
 
VIII 
 
 THE CROWN PRINCE 
 
 I T was a distinguished English writer who once 
 remarked that when the Crown Prince ascends 
 the throne Germany will breathe easier and 
 enjoy a rest. What the cynic meant to say was 
 that the boyish, light-hearted heir to Hohenzollern 
 sovereignty has inherited little of his brilliant 
 father’s ebullient energy, and that the Crown 
 Prince’s accession will, in all probability, inaugurate 
 an era of national repose as compared to the restless 
 atmosphere which the world associates with the 
 Kaiser. 
 
 Years ago, before the Crown Prince became a 
 husband and father, Germans used to have but one 
 reply when asked what manner of boy and man he 
 was. They called him an unbeschriebenes Blatt, 
 which is less libellous than it looks, for it means an 
 “unwritten page”—a totally unknown quantity. 
 With a parental stage-manager predisposed to 
 monopolise most of the speaking parts, the present 
 Heir-Apparent was condemned to play even a muter 
 role than falls to the lot of most eldest sons of 
 monarchs. But Crown Prince William is by no 
 means to-day the unknown quantity he used to 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 be. A full-fledged colonel of the Army at thirty-one, 
 he has made numerous occasions in recent times to 
 convince the country that he has a mind and a back¬ 
 bone of his own. He has shown that he is no more 
 of a colourless respecter of mere authority than was 
 his father and other Hohenzollern Crown Princes 
 before him. His popularity has increased along 
 with his periodical demonstrations of high-spirited 
 independence. A chip of the old block in but few 
 respects, he has, nevertheless, won a warm place in 
 the nation’s heart, and when his time comes Ger¬ 
 mans will acclaim him with unfeigned affection and 
 pin on him genuine hopes of a safe and sane reign. 
 
 Crown Prince William’s first notice to all con¬ 
 cerned that he had emerged from the personally- 
 conducted stage was the manner in which he went 
 about the important business of choosing a wife. It 
 is not of official record that the Kaiser cherished for 
 his heir an alliance of such obvious political value, 
 for example, as the marriage of Princess Victoria 
 Luise, his only daughter, to Prince Ernest Augustus 
 of Cumberland. At any rate, when the Crown 
 Prince went consort-hunting he decided to obey 
 exclusively the mandates of his own inclinations and 
 to marry for love and beauty. No royal romance 
 in any age was more purely ideal than that which 
 culminated in the wedding of the future German 
 Emperor and Cecelie, Duchess of Mecklenburg- 
 Schwerin, in the summer of 1905. The lithe 
 brunette Princess, who is half Russian, and more 
 French than German, took Berlin by storm when she 
 
 64 
 
1 Jj'- 
 

 
THE CROWN PRINCE 
 
 made her State entry into the Imperial capital. She 
 has nobly lived up to Hohenzollern traditions by 
 bearing her consort four sturdy sons within eight 
 years. 
 
 In the spring of 1907 the Crown Prince gave the 
 country another striking exhibition of his uncon¬ 
 strained character. Maximilian Harden’s Zukunft 
 for months had bristled with innuendoes that all 
 was not for the beet in the personal entourage of the 
 Kaiser. William II. is said to derive most of his 
 worldly information from selected press-cuttings. 
 Zukunft’s vitriolic shafts at Prince Eulenburg, 
 His Majesty’s great friend, and General Count Kuno 
 von Moltke, His Majesty’s aide-de-camp, had not 
 come to the Kaiser’s attention. The sparrows of 
 Berlin, in Harden’s own picturesque idiom, were 
 shrieking from the housetops the scandal of which 
 the allerhochste Person alone remained in blissful 
 ignorance. The Crown Prince conceived it to be 
 his patriotic and filial duty to bring the facts, 
 however unappetising, to his father’s attention. 
 The banishment of Eulenburg and Moltke from the 
 Imperial “round table’’ ensued, and six months 
 later the Harden trial brought forth the public 
 exposures which annihilated for ever the influence 
 and reputation of the Eulenburg-Moltke clique. 
 Germans would fain have been spared the ignominy 
 of those revelations, but in their hearts they were 
 grateful to Crown Prince William for precipitating 
 them. 
 
 Probably no more flattering light was ever thrown 
 
 65 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 on the Crown Prince’s character than by his letters 
 to his ex-comrade, Count von Hochberg, which 
 came to public knowledge four years ago in an 
 American lawsuit. The letters were never intended 
 to reach the world, yet the Crown Prince could 
 have wished for no better means of proving to 
 his future subjects that he is every inch a man. 
 Germans will not soon forget the splendid spirit of 
 personal loyalty which the letters breathed, nor the 
 almost plaintive happiness the Prince expressed over 
 the fact that “Papa talks politics with me once in 
 a while, and I like it.” That was interpreted as a 
 longing for serious occupation that did His Imperial 
 Highness credit. It was not long after that an 
 accident, which temporarily put the Kaiser’s right 
 hand out of action, induced him to transfer to the 
 Crown Prince for the first time the right of signing 
 State documents. 
 
 Crown Prince William’s supreme revelation of 
 rugged independence, or impetuosity, which is 
 sometimes the same thing, came to pass during the 
 season of national indignation which swept over 
 Germany following the Moroccan fiasco of 1911. 
 The Reichstag was debating what large sections of 
 the country considered to be the Government’s 
 pusillanimity in face of British “interference.” 
 Spokesman of the militant class, which would have 
 mobilised the German Army and Navy to avenge 
 Agadir, was Herr von Heydebrand, leader of the 
 Conservative Party. The Crown Prince was in the 
 Royal box. Von Heydebrand’s stinging attack 
 
 66 
 
THE CROWN PRINCE 
 
 on Dr. von Bethmann Hollweg’s conduct of the 
 Moroccan affair went straight to the Crown Prince’s 
 heart. Ostentatiously, so that all in the crowded 
 house might see, he applauded each belligerent 
 indictment which fell from the lips of the little 
 Junker who is known as the “uncrowned King of 
 Prussia.” It was an amazing demonstration and 
 unblushing act of revolution against his father’s 
 Government. The Imperial Chancellor, replying 
 to Von Heydebrand’s thrusts, pilloried him as a 
 warrior who carried his sword in his mouth. The 
 retort applied equally to the Heir of the Throne; but 
 the Crown Prince unquestionably gave vent, how¬ 
 ever tactlessly, to the sentiments gnawing at his 
 angry country’s heart, and he left the Reichstag 
 with his hold on the popular imagination even more 
 secure than it was before. 
 
 All these varied exhibitions of courageous and 
 high-minded initiative were expressions of a temper¬ 
 ament which the Crown Prince had manifested all 
 his life. He was long famed in the Army for dare¬ 
 devil horsemanship. He had to his credit the freak 
 of leading his squadron of dragoons up the terraced 
 steps of Sans Souci Palace at Potsdam, and holding 
 high jinks with them at the crest. Arrest in quarters 
 was the penalty, and a similar fate overtook him a 
 couple of years later when the Kaiser heard that his 
 heir had ridden and won a perilous steeplechase at 
 Karlshorst, the German Newmarket. Risk and 
 adventure make an irresistible appeal to this 
 vigorous Hohenzollern. He sailed in a Zeppelin 
 
 67 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 without asking anybody’s consent, and did not tell 
 the Kaiser of an aeroplane flight with Orville 
 Wright at Potsdam, till after he had the exhilarating 
 experience behind him. In Ceylon and India, in 
 the winter of 1910-1911, the Crown Prince’s hunts 
 in the jungle provided ample evidence that through 
 his veins courses the blood of a true and fearless 
 sportsman. 
 
 The zeal with which His Imperial Highness 
 devotes himself to sport of all kinds sometimes 
 makes his countrymen think the Crown Prince does 
 not take his royal heritage and future responsibilities 
 seriously. The charge has little basis of fact. 
 Being a Hohenzollern and the son of his father, 
 he is first of all a zealous soldier. For two years 
 he has been immured in a provincial garrison, 
 Danzig, far remote from Berlin and Potsdam— 
 exiled, it has been whispered, because of the Kaiser’s 
 alleged jealousy over the Crown Prince’s growing 
 popularity—and the Death’s Head Hussars have 
 never had a more earnest commander. He has a 
 weakness for leaves of absence, for he likes to 
 ski and flirt and sleigh at St. Moritz, and sail his 
 yachts at Kiel in the blithe summer time, and 
 attend theatre in Berlin, but he regards his military 
 profession as serious business, and has advanced 
 through all the successive grades to his present 
 rank of colonel, by dint of hard work and meri¬ 
 torious service. His enthusiasm for sport is far 
 remote from time-wasting. Germany needs shining 
 examples in the realm of games and outdoor play, 
 
 68 
 
THE CROWN PRINCE 
 
 and the pioneer work the Crown Prince and his 
 royal uncle, Prince Henry of Prussia, have done for 
 golf, tennis, rowing, hockey, football, polo, yachting 
 and boxing, is destined to redound to the glory of 
 Young Germany when she meets the world in 
 athletic combat at the Berlin Olympic Stadium in 
 1916. 
 
 Tall and narrow-chested, conveying the impres¬ 
 sion of physical weakness and only ordinary mental 
 calibre, the Crown Prince belies all his external 
 characteristics. Outwardly there is nothing of the 
 typical Hohenzollern about him. You trace his 
 physiognomy in vain for indications of martial 
 virility. Instead of the stern features of his father, 
 accentuated by the upturned moustaches, the Crown 
 Prince’s face is oftenest wreathed in a boyish smile. 
 It betokens kindliness of heart, which is one of his 
 most highly developed characteristics. He has the 
 Liebenswiirdigkeit of his much-loved grandfather, 
 Emperor Frederick. He is fond of music and plays 
 the violin well. Modesty and democracy are inborn 
 in him. Not long ago he took part in the golden 
 wedding feast of an humble Potsdam cobbler. 
 “The day will come,” he once said, “when Social 
 Democrats will go to Court.” He dotes on violating 
 the speed limit in his ninety horse-power motor car, 
 but he has been known to stop to pick up a peasant 
 found prostrate on the highway and drive him to 
 hospital. 
 
 The Crown Prince’s most passionate object of 
 admiration, next to his wife and boys, is the great 
 
 69 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 Napoleon. Pictures, statuettes, busts, medallions, 
 engravings and other mementoes of the Corsican 
 conqueror are to be seen in profusion in the Prince’s 
 study at the Marble Palace in Potsdam. The 
 oppressor, the liberation from whose yoke a century 
 ago all Prussia is now commemorating, and who 
 divided up this Hohenzollern’s own realm into 
 French provinces, is said to be the Crown Prince’s 
 model of what a great leader and strong ruler ought 
 to be. He is the idol of the German army almost 
 to a greater degree than his father. The Kaiser’s 
 periodical panegyrics on the blessings of peace do not 
 appeal to the military party. The Crown Prince’s 
 martial ebullitions make his brother-officers think he 
 is much more of a man of war than William II., and 
 it is he on whom their fondest hopes are pinned. 
 
 “Who knows,” a French writer once asked, 
 “whether it may not, perhaps, be the secret dream 
 of this young man to be a surviving and triumphant 
 Duke of Reichstadt, and to take up the wonderful 
 inheritance?” 
 
 In a moment of reverie during the chase in India, 
 the Crown Prince peered ahead to the time when 
 he will rule. He records his soliloquy in “My 
 Hunting Diary.” “I believe,” he said, “in the dictum 
 of my sainted ancestor, Frederick the Great, and 
 agree with him that people should be allowed to 
 pursue happiness and salvation, each in his own 
 sweet way.” The Fatherland’s destinies ought to 
 be safe in the keeping of a Supreme War Lord of 
 such ideals. 
 
IX 
 
 EMIL RATHENAU 
 
 “ A E.G.” Wherever you go in Germany, a 
 I \ trio of initials is constantly hitting you 
 jL JL. in the eye and striking the ear. You 
 encounter them in your newspaper and find them 
 cropping up in conversation. They are as ubiquitous 
 as the Liberte, Egalite et Fraternite of France. 
 Before you cease wondering whether they, too, may 
 not be a national emblem, you learn that they are 
 the popular form given to the name of Germany’s 
 foremost industrial undertaking, the Allgemeine 
 Electricitats Gesellschaft —General Electric Com¬ 
 pany. The home address of the A.E.G. is Berlin, 
 but its interests and influence comprehend the globe. 
 Its flag flies in Russia, France, Austria, Italy, 
 Sweden, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, South Africa, 
 the Argentine, Uruguay, Chile and the Dutch East 
 Indies. In its own country it is almost as much of 
 an institution as the Army or any of the other big 
 national establishments, without which Germany 
 would not be what it is. The company is a young¬ 
 ster, as great businesses go. It is not the product 
 of four generations, like Krupp’s. It was founded 
 only thirty years ago by the man who still heads it, 
 
 71 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 Emil Rathenau. It began with a capital of 
 $1,250,000. To-day the A.E.G. disposes over 
 interests valued at $1,000,000,000, which is exactly 
 the amount of the war indemnity Germany extorted 
 from conquered France. 
 
 Like Ballin of Hamburg, Rathenau is a Jew and 
 utterly self-made. The three outstanding figures 
 of Business Germany—Ballin, Thyssen and Rathe¬ 
 nau—are types of the men with whom the new 
 Fatherland was providentially endowed at the 
 psychological moment of its crowning necessities. 
 Bismarck had accomplished in the creation of the 
 Empire a political achievement of such all-embrac¬ 
 ing magnitude that there was no longer either place 
 or occasion for great deeds of statesmanship or 
 towering personalities to perform them. The work 
 of conquest still to be done was essentially economic. 
 The brains of the Griinderjahre turned naturally 
 to business. That explains why modern Germany 
 possesses a surplus of mercantile and industrial 
 genius and suffers from a dearth of political talent. 
 The giants of the post-Bismarck era were called 
 upon to perform deeds as Trojan as the Unification. 
 The stupendous industrial fabric they were to 
 evolve had to be wrung from a soil comparatively 
 barren of natural wealth. Against the bountiful 
 resources of an American, they had to match organ¬ 
 izing skill, scientific methods, daring enterprise and 
 grinding toil. And they had to fight for their 
 lives against the hampering traditions of a regime 
 steeped in bureaucracy. 
 
 72 
 
EMIL RATHENAU 
 
 Emil Rathenau has probably clone more than any 
 other one man to precipitate Germany to the front 
 rank industrially. He brought in the telephone and 
 the incandescent light. He established the first 
 electric light “plant.” He blazed the way for the 
 transmission of electric power for manufacturing 
 purposes. He made possible the development of 
 electric tramways. He was the pioneer of the 
 turbine. He devised countless new uses for applied 
 electricity and manufactured the apparatus for 
 them. Above and before all, he originated the 
 system of creating a demand for that which he 
 desired to supply, and invented the principle of 
 financing people or communities which wanted and 
 needed what he had to give them, but lacked the 
 ready money to buy it. He became engineer, 
 merchant, manufacturer and banker rolled into one. 
 It takes but a paragraph to catalogue Rathenau’s 
 achievements; it would require an encyclopaedia to 
 record the epoch which they inaugurated. 
 
 Rathenau is a born Berliner, like his father before 
 him. He manifested early symptoms of wanderlust, 
 and before emerging from the ’teens was an appren¬ 
 tice in overalls and blouse at a machinery foundry 
 in Silesia. There he spent four years of grimy toil, 
 later to invest an inheritance of $3,750 in courses of 
 training at the Polytechnical colleges of Hanover 
 and Zurich. England was then the unchallengeable 
 mistress of the mechanical universe, and Rathenau’s 
 next occupation was as a volunteer draughtsman in 
 the ship-engine building firm of Messrs. John Penn 
 73 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 & Co., of Greenwich. He returned to Germany 
 with his own design for a i,ooo-h.p., expansion 
 engine, and presently went into business on his own 
 account as the proprietor of a small foundry in 
 Berlin. His plans and ambitions speedily outran 
 his means and credit, and he eventually sold the 
 foundry with nothing gained except an experience 
 which was to prove the foundation of his career. 
 He laid down for himself forthwith the principle 
 of never engaging in an enterprise before the capital 
 was in sight. The colossal transactions of the 
 A.E.G. of to-day, representing annual business of 
 over $75,000,000, are all based on the lessons of 
 Emil Rathenau’s luckless venture of callow days. 
 He never forgave the banking fraternity for leaving 
 his little foundry in the lurch. Nowadays he is 
 one of the few captains of German industry who 
 dictate terms to the financiers. It is usually the 
 other way about. 
 
 For the succeeding ten years Rathenau was 
 practically idle. Germany was in the throes of the 
 economic crisis which followed the Franco-Prussian 
 War. With that almost superhuman power of 
 divination which is his distinguishing characteristic, 
 Rathenau realized the time was not yet ripe for 
 launching the ambitious schemes surging and 
 maturing in his restless brain. He contemplated 
 impatiently from afar the triumphs of labour-sav¬ 
 ing machinery in the United States. He tried 
 and failed to induce the German War Office, 
 which wanted to reconstruct 800,000 captured 
 
 74 
 
EMIL RATHENAU 
 
 French CJiassepot rifles, to let him carry out the 
 work with American machinery, which enabled him 
 to tender for the work at a third of the price asked 
 by rivals. Labour-saving machinery was still ex¬ 
 coriated in Germany as “American bluff.” 
 
 The virus of doing things on a colossal scale was 
 implanted in Rathenau’s system by his visit to the 
 Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia in 1876. 
 He returned bubbling with enthusiasm over the 
 dimensions of everything Transatlantic. He had 
 been fascinated most of all by the telephone on 
 public exhibition for the first time at the Centennial. 
 It electrified his soul, as he has since epitomized 
 his emotions. For a while he considered acquiring 
 the right to manufacture telephone apparatus, but 
 finally decided to apply for a franchise to furnish 
 telephone service in Berlin. Bureaucratic opposi¬ 
 tion almost shattered his plans. The Postmaster- 
 General said a telephone exchange in Berlin would 
 secure at the most twenty-three subscribers, but 
 it was not long before the postal authorities were 
 asking Rathenau to superintend the installation. 
 
 Rathenau did not really strike his gait until 
 1881, when Edison’s incandescent light was on 
 display in Europe for the first time at the Paris 
 Electricity Exhibition. Rathenau’s intuition told 
 him instantly that the future of illumination 
 belonged indisputably to the little pear-shaped bulb. 
 He determined to dedicate his energies to acquiring 
 the light for Germany and exploiting it to the 
 uttermost degree. In short order he formed the 
 
 75 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 German Edison Company for Applied Electricity, 
 which was to become the nucleus of the A.E.G. 
 
 Thenceforth Emil Rathenau’s career was a series 
 of engineering, financial and commercial triumphs. 
 Each outstripped its forerunner in boldness of 
 conception, magnitude and success. In 1887 the 
 Edison Company was transformed into the General 
 Electric Company, which now undertook the manu¬ 
 facture of electric apparatus on a huge scale. There 
 was not enough electric light being consumed in 
 Berlin to suit Rathenau, so he evolved the idea of 
 creating a demand for it. Hitherto it had been a 
 luxury. He decided to make it a commodity. His 
 ambition was to make it a necessity. He organized 
 the Berlin Electricity Works, secured by municipal 
 charter the right to use the streets for transmission 
 of current far and wide, and proceeded to deliver 
 electricity to the consumer at an attractive price. 
 To-day, the Berlin Electricity Works, which con¬ 
 trols the light and power supply of a vast metrop¬ 
 olis, represents a $30,000,000 property. The City 
 of Berlin, which in 1889 derived $3,750 annual 
 compensation from the Rathenau franchise, now 
 draws $1,500,000 a year from the same source. 
 
 Rathenau, having by this time thoroughly intro¬ 
 duced the Electric era, next turned his attention 
 to tramways. The old firm of Siemens & Halske, 
 which in the past had fairly monopolized the 
 electrical industry, had now to reckon with a dan¬ 
 gerous antagonist. Rathenau’s scheme of inducing 
 communities to build and operate their own power- 
 
 76 
 
EMIL RATHENAU 
 
 plants seemed unethical to Siemens & Halske, who 
 entered without reluctance into an apparently inno¬ 
 cent arrangement proposed by Rathenau, whereby 
 they should enjoy non-competitive advantages in 
 the carrying out of business which came to them 
 voluntarily from States, cities or private individuals, 
 while Rathenau’s A.E.G. should be undisturbed in 
 the pursuit of concessions and in their execution. 
 Messrs. Siemens & Halske had never looked with 
 favour on the ultra-modern tactics of the “industrial 
 banker,” who made a pernicious practice of looking 
 for orders instead of waiting for them. It was not 
 long before they assented to the annulment of the 
 agreement into which they had so cheerfully 
 entered. They found that the Rathenau principle 
 of creating consumption was not only sound, but 
 irresistible. 
 
 Rathenau was now recognized as a sagacious and 
 resourceful financier. The electrical industry was 
 expanding at such a break-neck pace that he fore¬ 
 saw the urgency of extraordinary methods of 
 financing it. To that end, in 1895, he founded the 
 “Bank for Electrical Undertakings” at Zurich, 
 which was intended to be a “holding company” on 
 the American model. Its primary purpose was to 
 promote electrical enterprises of all conceivable 
 sorts and to control their operations in the interests 
 of the A.E.G. Since then he has founded two other 
 “holding companies,” to supervise the technical 
 management of the numerous daughter concerns 
 which the A.E.G. has brought into existence at 
 
 77 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 home and abroad. In 1902, as a counterstroke to 
 the acquirement of the important Schuckert works 
 at Nuremberg by Siemens & Halske, the A.E.G. 
 took over the Union Electrical Company of Berlin. 
 In 1910, his passion for expansion still ungratified, 
 Rathenau annexed the electric and cable works of 
 the great firms of Lahmayer at Frankfort and 
 Felter-Guilleaume at Miilheim. 
 
 The secret of Emil Rathenau’s success is twofold: 
 divination and market creation. The underlying 
 object of every undertaking he ever launched was 
 the creation of a wider consumption of electricity. 
 He has his eye fixed on electrification of steam 
 railways as the next great goal of the industry. 
 Bureaucratic old-fogeyism, his ancient foe, has 
 again intrenched against him, but he hopes to live 
 to dislodge it. If he could have his way, he would 
 buy up the most important line in the country, that 
 running between Berlin and Hamburg, and electrify 
 it at his own expense merely to illustrate the prac¬ 
 ticability of his idea. Together with Siemens & 
 Halske, he spent $625,000 a few years ago for the 
 purpose of demonstrating that an electrically pro¬ 
 pelled railway carriage could travel at the rate of 
 one hundred and twenty-five miles an hour. 
 
 Rathenau is not what is ordinarily called smart or 
 clever. He does not understand the art of haggling. 
 He is almost thick-headed. He has no talent 
 whatever, and less patience, for complicated things. 
 Nothing appeals to him which cannot be made 
 plain enough for a child to comprehend. He has 
 
 78 
 
EMIL RATHENAU 
 
 accomplished all his great strokes by reducing 
 problems to the proportions of utter simplicity and 
 plausibility. When he lays a million-pound scheme 
 before a bank or submits an electrical project to a 
 town council, it is as transparent as his own incan- 
 descents. He is sincere and open to the point of 
 naivete. He thinks at least ten years ahead of the 
 ordinary man. All his triumphs have been the feats 
 of a seer. He predicted the German commercial 
 crisis of 1901 almost to the day. The Electric King 
 has no hobbies. He eats, sleeps, drinks and thinks 
 business. His only interest outside of it is a 
 generous philanthropy. No worthy appeal is ever 
 directed to him in vain. Rathenau is seventy-four 
 years old and in indifferent health, but the hand 
 on the throttle of the A.E.G. is still his. 
 
 * 
 
X 
 
 MAX REINHARDT 
 
 W HEN Herr Otto Brahm, the late Nestor 
 of the German stage, was on a periodical 
 still-hunt for talent in Austria one day 
 in the early ’nineties the pupils of the School of 
 Acting at the Vienna Conservatorium were put 
 through their paces for his edification. His at¬ 
 tention was speedily riveted upon a young actor 
 who was giving a moving impersonation of an old 
 man. Brahm made a mental snapshot of his im¬ 
 pressions and adjured the director of the Schau- 
 spielschule to keep an eye on the stocky stripling 
 who had played with such appealing realism. His 
 name was Max Reinhardt. 
 
 It is to-day beside the mark to speak merely 
 of Reinhardt’s influence on the German stage. It 
 is sheer domination he now wields. Detractors 
 and imitators alike have failed to arrest his prog¬ 
 ress. He has marched from triumph to triumph, 
 not only at home, but abroad. London capitulated 
 to the sublimity of his art in Sumurun, then in 
 The Miracle and King CEdipus. Paris, New York, 
 St. Petersburg, Moscow, Vienna, Budapest and 
 Stockholm have in turn acclaimed it. The gifted 
 Austrian of thirty-nine is the great world-figure 
 of the twentieth-century stage. 
 
 8o 
 
MAX REINHARDT 
 
 Max Reinhardt’s distinguishing characteristics 
 are energy, modesty, concentration and restless 
 ambition. His gluttony for work approaches the 
 superhuman. A well-knit frame of somewhat less 
 than average height, surmounted by a leonine head 
 and sturdy shoulders, denotes the physical power 
 within him. Spirituality and strength of character 
 shine forth no less eloquently from his dark grey 
 eyes, which illuminate a smooth-shaven countenance 
 ringed by a wealth of upstanding, blackish-brown 
 hair with a distinct tendency to curl. 
 
 To watch Reinhardt at work is to see a human 
 dynamo in motion, but a noiseless one. He 
 “hustles” without making a fuss about it. He is 
 imperturbability itself. He is said not to know 
 the art of losing his temper. His foes—Berlin is 
 full of them—assure one that Reinhardt finds his 
 keenest delight in remaking and mutilating the 
 masterpieces of the immortals. His methods are 
 beyond all question essentially revolutionary. Every 
 piece he produces, be it comedy, farce, drama or 
 tragedy, is approached with the firm determina¬ 
 tion to obliterate the stereotyped and to stamp 
 it with vivid individuality. He has proclaimed 
 that the eye has equal rights in the theatre with 
 the ear. He lives boldly up to his artistic Decalogue, 
 especially when the old-time classics engage his 
 attention. Then is when the blood of his critics 
 threatens to boil over. The liberties he takes, the 
 abandon with which he lops off whole scenes from 
 original texts, the brazenness with which he rele- 
 
 8i 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 gates tradition and establishes precedents, the rich¬ 
 ness of his settings, make his detractors gasp and 
 scoff. They cry that A Winter’s Tale and A Mid¬ 
 summer Night’s Dream, as done at the Deutsches 
 Theater, may be magnificent, but are not Shake¬ 
 speare; that Katchen von Hcilbronn is brilliant, but 
 not Ivleist. When The Robbers is put on, the oppo¬ 
 sition complain that they are regaled with Reinhardt 
 instead of Schiller, and last season when the 
 Deutsches Theater revived the second part of Faust, 
 the croakers shrieked: “This is not Goethe!” 
 
 Like Richard Strauss, Reinhardt waves a magic 
 wand over abuse and turns it into encouragement. 
 He hoists higher and higher upon his banner the 
 heretical doctrine that the theatre is neither ex¬ 
 clusively a moral nor a literary institution; that 
 its mission is not essentially to guide human conduct, 
 nor to be the medium of giving expression to writ¬ 
 ings devoid of theatrical merit. “The theatre be¬ 
 longs to the theatre” is his motto. He has decreed 
 that his stage shall hold the mirror up to nature re¬ 
 ligiously, even mercilessly, and that his repertoire 
 shall be as kaleidoscopic as life itself—“Where the 
 whole scale of Fate, from the depth of its horrors 
 to the dizziest heights of its joys, shall be played 
 upon; where men and women shall sob and laugh; 
 where colour, now dull and dismal, now bright and 
 joyous, shall alternate; where orchestra and chorus 
 ,shall sometimes revel, sometimes mourn; where 
 actors shall play the tragedian to-day, to-morrow 
 the clown,” 
 
 82 
 
MAX REINHARDT 
 
 These canons make up Reinhardt’s theatrical 
 bible. Ideals and innovations are his daily bread. 
 He never stands still. He resorted to the revolving 
 stage because the stationary boards of the the¬ 
 atrical fathers had outgrown their usefulness for 
 his restless purposes. In conjunction with masterly 
 scenic artists, Ernst Stern and Roller, Reinhardt 
 evolved the secret of stage heavens and clouds of 
 convincing naturalness. He set about to reorganise 
 lighting schemes, and drew lavishly upon the won¬ 
 ders of modern electricity. He banished all make- 
 believe from his stage-pictures. Books, doors, 
 windows, bric-a-brac, flowers, everything, however 
 insignificant, had to be actual. “Property” counter¬ 
 feits of all kinds vanished. When the action re¬ 
 quires the reproduction of a Kaffee-Klatsch, the 
 aroma of genuine coffee floats out over Reinhardt’s 
 footlights and makes you thirsty. Richness incom¬ 
 parable, wherever in place—Spartan simplicity 
 where it belongs—were adopted as the broad gen¬ 
 eral lines of his scenic policy. You come away 
 from the Deutsches Theater and the Kammerspiele 
 feeling always that you have communed with the 
 real thing. 
 
 Upon his players Reinhardt imposes the same 
 relentless thoroughness. His actors and actresses 
 are given plenty of latitude for assertion of 
 individuality, but they understand that they are 
 there for the play, not the play for them. 
 He never produces pieces for the exploitation of 
 stars. His successes are wrought from painstaking 
 
 83 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 drilling of entire casts. The personal note is re¬ 
 morselessly subordinated to the artistic, compact 
 whole. 
 
 If Reinhardt is dominated by any one single 
 ideal more than another, it is his theory of inti¬ 
 mate contact between players and audience. He 
 ventilated it in his first managerial venture, the 
 Ucberbrettl, that fantastic form of theatrical enter¬ 
 tainment which marked the birth of the new century 
 in Germany. 
 
 Sumurun, the Oriental pantomime of exquisite 
 beauty, The Miracle, the colossal “wordless play” 
 which fascinated England, and King CEdipus 
 were all in the line of logical development 
 of Reinhardt’s intimacy ideal—the placing of the 
 play and players at the very feet of their audience, 
 in order that spectators may become an integral 
 part and parcel of the performance, living its joys, 
 enduring its horrors, utterly wrapped up in what 
 is going on around about them. Reinhardt would 
 restore the drama in other words to the ancient 
 Grecian environment, which is the mainspring of 
 another of his cherished ideals—the creation of 
 what he expressively calls the Theatre of the Five 
 Thousand. When he is able to produce Euripides 
 and Sophocles and Shakespeare and Schiller with 
 casts of two thousand in the literal midst of an 
 audience of five thousand or even ten thousand—the 
 “intimacy” idea exploited to the n -th degree—Rein¬ 
 hardt will have approached the zenith of his am¬ 
 bition. A monumental production of Julius Ccesar, 
 
 84 
 
MAX REINHARDT 
 
 which is now in rehearsal, is to inaugurate this 
 most gigantic of all Reinhardtian conceptions. 
 
 Reinhardt began his career as an actor-manager 
 at the Kleines Theater in Berlin, and achieved an 
 initial triumph in Strindberg’s Drunkenness. About 
 this time a German production of Oscar Wilde’s 
 Salome was wrecked by the Censor. Reinhardt 
 produced it privately, himself playing a pious 
 Jewish mendicant. Salome was an artistic hit. 
 Richard Strauss was inspired by it to write his 
 opera of the same name. Salome, later relinquished 
 for public performance, established Wilde in Ger¬ 
 man favour. Having popularised Strindberg the 
 Swede, Wilde the Englishman, and Frank Wede¬ 
 kind, a young German of their intellectual ilk, Rein¬ 
 hardt now took up Maxim Gorki, the poet of Rus¬ 
 sian revolution. Gorki’s Night Asylum crowned 
 Reinhardt’s reputation not only as a producer, but 
 as a player, for his representation of the venerable 
 pilgrim Luka was an epoch-making characterisa¬ 
 tion. Night Asylum achieved a German record of 
 500 performances. Then Reinhardt took a second 
 and still larger establishment, the Neues Theater, 
 where he scored heavily with a scintillating pro¬ 
 duction of Maeterlinck’s Pelleas and Melisande, and 
 later with the most beautiful version of A Mid¬ 
 summer Night’s Dream ever seen on any stage. 
 Bernard Shaw’s fame had now crossed the Channel, 
 and Reinhardt’s thirst for novelties led him to in¬ 
 troduce Arms and the Man and Candida, both suc¬ 
 cessfully. 
 
 85 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 When the Deutsches Theater, where Reinhardt 
 had begun his career less than twelve years pre¬ 
 viously, was looking for a new master in 1905, the 
 choice fell naturally upon Reinhardt. In the autumn 
 of that year he took formal possession of the famous 
 playhouse in the Schumann-strasse, where he now 
 reigns supreme. One of his introductory produc¬ 
 tions there was The Merchant of Venice, which re¬ 
 vealed afresh his resourcefulness as a stage wizard. 
 Germany, which considers Shakespeare, to quote a 
 piquant epigram of Sir Herbert Tree, a literary 
 Heligoland, had seen many “Merchants,” but none 
 to match the beauties of Reinhardt’s pastelles and 
 portraits, and the glorious fidelity to detail with 
 which he caparisoned each and every scene. Pres¬ 
 ently Reinhardt inaugurated his latest idea, the 
 theatre intime. For it he built the Kammerspiele, 
 next door to the Deutsches Theater. He meant it to 
 be dedicated exclusively to literary hors d’oeuvres. 
 It has only three hundred seats—deep, upholstered 
 armchairs. Its walls are of red mahogany, and its 
 aisles richly carpeted with rugs—a temple where 
 the select few bent upon quiet enjoyment of a 
 theatrical morsel may devour it in immediate proxi¬ 
 mity of the players and amid charming privacy. 
 The Kammerspiele, before its conversion into a 
 theatre, had been a midinettes’ dance-hall, and Rein¬ 
 hardt’s detractors, with heavy irony, ridiculed the 
 notion of a temple of art on a spot enshrined with 
 the traditions of Emberg’s; but Ibsen’s Ghosts, 
 with which Reinhardt dedicated the Kammerspiele, 
 
 86 
 
MAX REINHARDT 
 
 was an instantaneous success, and the little play¬ 
 house’s foundation was vindicated in a night. Then 
 followed in rapid succession more “intimate” pro¬ 
 ductions which the peculiarly secluded atmosphere 
 made both possible and plausible—Frank Wede¬ 
 kind’s Awakening of Spring, an inexpressibly bold 
 grapple with the sexual problem, which Fraulein 
 Camilla Eibenschiitz endowed with a poetically 
 realistic creation, and Maeterlinck's Aglavaine 
 and Selysette, to mention the most daring of 
 many. 
 
 Reinhardt is a believer in youth. He has had 
 little to do with finished players. He prefers to 
 catch them young and infuse them with his own 
 ideals. He educates eight young people, gifted with 
 extraordinary talent, free of charge every year 
 at the Deutsches Theater. His collaborators are 
 a staff of young field-marshals, whose loyalty and 
 devotion another Napoleon might have envied. 
 Stern, the alchemist who designs costumes and 
 decorations of surpassing beauty; Hollander, Gers- 
 dorff, Kahane, Held, Winterstein, and Ordynski — a 
 talented Austrian Pole, who is Reinhardt’s minister 
 for foreign affairs—are all men still on the sunny 
 side of the philosophic age. And there is Edmund 
 Reinhardt, the professor’s brother, as much a genius 
 at the administrative and business end of the the¬ 
 atrical profession as Max is in the domain of 
 art. They form a matchless combination, these 
 poets, playwrights, stage managers and advisers of 
 Reinhardt, who would be himself the first to say 
 
 8Z 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 that they, not he, are the real architects of his 
 greatness. 
 
 Reinhardt is one of the world’s busy men who 
 finds time for a full and ideal home life. His wife 
 is a gifted actress, who plays under the stage name 
 of Else Heims, and they have two bonny boys to 
 whom father and mother are passionately attached. 
 Reinhardt’s home in the Kupfergraben in Berlin 
 breathes the artist in every nook and corner, 
 revealing a strong predilection for antiques in 
 porcelain, bronze and oils. He is a hard smoker, a 
 good Jew, and the affectionate son of a widowed 
 mother. He takes his vacations in the Bavarian 
 Tyrol, and his hobbies are swimming and reading. 
 He is approachable and affable, and if you are 
 calling at the Deutsches Theater for the first time, 
 look for the most unassuming and best-humoured 
 man on the premises, and it will be Max Reinhardt. 
 
XI 
 
 VON HEYDEBRAND 
 
 E ACH recurring February Berlin is invaded 
 by a host of florid-faced giants, wearing 
 jaunty Tyrolean hats and whiskers redolent 
 of the soil, who transform the throbbing capital into 
 a bucolic metropolis. They are the masters of 
 Germany, these sturdy emissaries of the Empire’s 
 landowning and agricultural interests, assembled in 
 annual conclave to review their mighty cohorts, and 
 proclaim afresh the paramountcy of Agrarianism 
 in shaping the destiny of the Fatherland. That is 
 the aim and end of the yearly pow-wow of the 
 Bund der Landwirte. 
 
 Originally instituted as a parliament for the 
 discussion of purely farming questions, the “week” 
 has become a political event of the first magnitude. 
 Its raison d’etre is to hammer home the iron fact 
 that, although Agrarians represent only twenty- 
 eight and six tenths per cent, of the population, the 
 reins of government are firmly in their grasp. It is 
 not an inspiring spectacle, this yearly feast of gloat¬ 
 ing over Minority Rule. It calls forth violent pro¬ 
 test from the downtrodden majority, and fervid 
 demands for liberation from Agrarian tyranny. 
 
 89 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 As yet no Samson has arisen capable of breaking 
 the power of the agricultural autocracy. Finance, 
 commerce and industry, in consequence of the 
 Government’s surrender to Agrarian dictation on 
 the occasion of the Finance Reform Bill in 1909, 
 organised the Hansa League as a bulwark against 
 the unceasing encroachments of the Farmers’ Alli¬ 
 ance, but the Junkers still sit enthroned. 
 
 It is small wonder that Dr. Ernst von Heyde- 
 brand, the leader of the Agrarian element, whose 
 political label is Conservative, is known as the 
 Uncrowned King of Prussia. Though its numerical 
 strength neither in the Imperial Parliament nor the 
 Prussian Diet is formidable, Conservatism’s influ¬ 
 ence on Government is paramount. Chancellors 
 challenge it at their peril. Billow risked it and 
 perished. Bethmann Hollweg trembles when Jove 
 Heydebrand frowns. The Kaiser himself is con¬ 
 strained to consort publicly and ostentatiously with 
 the Bundler. In recent years he has made it a 
 practice to attend their annual congress in Berlin 
 and, describing himself as one of them, participates 
 actively in their deliberations. A speech from the 
 Throne once expressed the Royal will to reform 
 Prussia’s archaic electoral laws. Heydebrand said 
 no, and the three-class voting system remains, 
 a travesty on Government conducted under a 
 Constitution. 
 
 Heydebrand, like many German politicians, is a 
 member of both the Prussian Diet and the Reichs¬ 
 tag. He leads the Conservative forces in both 
 
 90 
 
VON HEYDEBRAND 
 
 Houses. Individually almost the most powerful 
 man in German politics, he is physically the most 
 diminutive. He stands barely five feet in height, 
 and when slouching in his seat, hands imbedded 
 deep in his trousers pockets—his favourite attitude 
 in repose—he is almost hidden by the portfolio of 
 papers which adorns his desk. In conversation 
 with the elongated Dr. von Bethmann Hollweg he 
 looks almost a dwarf. Von Heydebrand’s whole 
 bearing is in keeping with his exterior, unpreten¬ 
 tious to a degree. A faithful attendant of sessions 
 in a House which must frequently adjourn for lack 
 of a quorum, he rarely intrudes himself on the 
 Reichstag’s attention. Listening and thinking are 
 his forte. A forceful orator and debater, he speaks 
 only on extraordinary occasions. When his appear¬ 
 ance is known of in advance, both House and 
 galleries fill up. 
 
 Von Heydebrand, as becomes a King, is unac¬ 
 quainted with fear, and hits straight from the 
 shoulder when he has something to say. Although 
 Conservatism and Government are boon com¬ 
 panions and traditional bedfellows in Germany, the 
 party takes the powers that be unhesitatingly to 
 task when necessity demands. Von Heydebrand is 
 the man who applies the lash on these occasions. 
 He seems to expand to the stature of a grenadier 
 as he advances to the fray, and you cease to wonder 
 that words of such power and invective of such 
 incisiveness can spring from so demure and minute 
 a figure. Germany will not soon forget the castiga- 
 
 91 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 tion he administered to the Government in Novem¬ 
 ber, 1911, after the full dimensions of the Morocco 
 fiasco were apparent. In terms of crushing censure 
 Heydebrand assailed Dr. von Bethmann Hollweg 
 and Herr von Kiderlen-Waechter for having rattled 
 the sabre at Agadir, only ignominiously to sheathe 
 it in craven fear of perfidious Albion. He recalled 
 the glories of Prussia, and reminded the Govern¬ 
 ment that Germans had fought best when they 
 fought alone and against a world in arms. He 
 demanded to know the why and wherefore of 
 the Empire’s colossal armaments on land and sea 
 if the Fatherland were to retreat at a critical 
 moment. A young officer in the uniform of the 
 Death’s Head Hussars sat in the Royal box of the 
 House, hanging intently on each rasping word that 
 fell from the little Conservative leader’s scolding 
 lips. It was the Crown Prince. When Heydebrand 
 finished, the future Kaiser joined spontaneously 
 in the thunder of applause which rolled over the 
 entire House. A Jingo harangue of purest essence, 
 it yet epitomised outraged German public sentiment 
 beyond the shadow of a doubt. Dr. von Bethmann 
 Hollweg’s subsequent rebuke of the Uncrowned 
 King as a man “who carries his sword in his 
 mouth” failed to obliterate the impression Heyde- 
 brand’s impassioned outburst made upon the 
 country. 
 
 The forces which this Napoleonic personality 
 commands attained power after the disappearance 
 of Bismarck, who governed principally with the aid 
 
 92 
 
VON HEYDEBRAND 
 
 of mobile National Liberal majorities. The so-called 
 Caprivi era, that of the second Chancellorship, 
 gave Agrarianism its chance. Count Caprivi, the 
 soldier-statesman, had effected a series of long-term 
 commercial treaties with Germany’s neighbours, 
 deliberately favouring the country’s then budding 
 industry at the expense of agriculture. He bartered 
 low rates on Russian wheat, Austrian rye, Danish 
 meats and dairy products and Hungarian barley for 
 preferential duties on German manufactures. His 
 treaties were the logical expression of Germany’s 
 conversion from an agricultural into an industrial 
 State. Endless warfare between Agrarianism and 
 business ensued. To annihilate the Caprivi treaties 
 at their expiration in 1902 and substitute pacts of 
 genuinely Agrarian flavour became the consuming 
 ambition of the land barons of East and West 
 Prussia, Pomerania, Mecklenburg, Silesia and Bran¬ 
 denburg. Prince Biilow was to be made to atone 
 for the treachery of Count Caprivi. Atone he 
 did. He donned the Junker yoke publicly at a 
 banquet, at which he declared that his fondest 
 wish was for an epitaph reading: “I was an 
 Agrarian Chancellor.” In 1902, under his auspices, 
 an Agrarian tariff was enacted by the Reichstag. 
 On its basis new treaties were concluded which 
 betrayed German industry relentlessly in order that 
 grain, cattle and dairy products might benefit. 
 The position conquered by German industry abroad 
 under Caprivian conditions was almost demolished. 
 Pioneering work of twelve years had to be com- 
 
 93 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 menced all over again. That German exports, 
 almost exclusively of manufactured origin, amount 
 to-day to $2,250,000,000 per annum, is no fault of 
 Herr von Heydebrand and the self-centred patriots 
 whose version of the national anthem is: 
 
 “Unser Konig absolut, 
 
 Wenn er unseren Willen tut!” 
 
 (We are for an absolutist King, provided he does 
 our will!) 
 
 Throne and monarchy have always been ear¬ 
 marked by the Junkers of Prussia as their particular 
 watch and ward. Their bosoms swell several 
 degrees more expansively than the chests of or¬ 
 dinary Germans when the talk is of loyalty to the 
 King. They are the self-appointed guardians of the 
 orthodox creed. The emblem of their official news¬ 
 paper is a cross wreathed by a motto proclaiming 
 Conservatism’s partnership with Deity. Govern¬ 
 ment, the Army, diplomacy—all the great services 
 of the State except the Navy, where proved efficiency 
 is still the requirement—are practically the 
 monopoly of Conservative Vons. A Simon Pure 
 Agrarian like Heydebrand eats a Socialist alive 
 every morning for breakfast. He frequently makes 
 a dessert of a merchant or a banker. He shares 
 unqualifiedly the Hohenzollerns’ belief that they 
 rule by right Divine. Herr von Oldenburg, a 
 paladin of Heydebrand, once gave expression to the 
 typically Agrarian theory that the Kaiser ought 
 to have authority to order “a lieutenant and ten 
 men” to close up the Reichstag any time it grew; 
 
 94 
 
VON HEYDEBRAND 
 
 refractory. When the rest of the country was 
 lampooning Emperor William for his loquacious 
 confidences to the Daily Telegraph, his only de¬ 
 fenders were the land-barons, who are reared in the 
 religion that Prussia’s King can do no harm. Von 
 Heydebrand’s plaid oyer on behalf of the Kaiser was 
 one of the most striking public utterances of contem¬ 
 porary German history. Likewise, it was the death 
 warrant of Prince Billow. 
 
 When the Conservative generalissimo is not at 
 work in Berlin, he leads the life of a retired country 
 gentleman at his splendid estate of Klein- 
 Tschunkawe in Silesia. His abode is a rambling, 
 ivy-covered building reconstructed to resemble a 
 feudal castle. Before its portal is a modest monu¬ 
 ment, an eagle rampant on a sphere of rock, erected 
 in honour of the hundredth anniversary of the 
 family’s ownership of Klein-Tschunkawe. The 
 walls of the castle are hung with trophies of the 
 chase, for the lord of the manor, like every German 
 Gutsherr, is a passionate hunter. Throughout the 
 simply furnished house are canvasses of earlier 
 members of the Hey debrand dynasty. Restfulness 
 is the dominant note. It is the retreat of a man 
 who returns from the fray eager for the repose of 
 home. Though politics are his forte, pigs and horses 
 and rye-fields are Heydebrand’s hobbies, and his 
 friends assert he is far happier running his farm 
 than bossing the Government. 
 
 Dr. Heydebrand’s strength—his full name is 
 Von Iieydebrand und der Lasa—is essentially the 
 
 95 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 power of personality. He is not imperious by 
 nature, nor greedy for domination. A barrister by 
 profession, he has been in public life for twenty- 
 five years, and was sixty-three years old on his last 
 birthday. Sprung from the soil which has produced 
 Prussia’s greatest rulers, warriors and statesmen, he 
 is of the class which regards itself ordained to sway 
 the destinies of Imperial Germany. Bismarck was 
 one of its products, and the career of Heydebrand 
 bears witness that the Agrarians of to-day are men 
 of blood and iron too. 
 
XII 
 
 RICHARD STRAUSS 
 
 S EEKERS of sidelights on Richard Strauss, 
 the man as distinguished from the musician— 
 on the purely human in him—stumble first 
 and invariably on anecdotes of his parsimony. 
 However niggardly Strauss may be in matters of 
 money, there is nothing stingy about him when it 
 comes to noise. In production of tonal volume he 
 is lavishness personified. He has made the cyclonic 
 diapasons of Wagner seem like whispers, and has 
 out-thundered Thor. In the storm and stress period 
 which followed the humbling of France, when New 
 Germany was more interested in the production of 
 dividends than music, Apollo had no exponents of 
 the first magnitude. With the death of Wagner in 
 1883 there was destined to be a long interval before 
 German music should again give forth a genius 
 in the person of another Richard. Perhaps the 
 psychology of Strauss’ noise lies in his conviction 
 that after so prolonged a period of obliteration, it 
 was necessary for artistic Germany to affirm its 
 musical reincarnation in no uncertain tones. At 
 any rate, when Don Quixote, Heldcnlcben, Till 
 Eulenspiegel, and the Symphonia Doniestica burst 
 
 97 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 upon the world, it was manifest that the reign and 
 times of William II. were to be illumined by a 
 master worthy of the race of Beethoven, Brahms 
 and Mozart. 
 
 Richard Strauss is the Bernard Shaw of music 
 or vice versa. Both are confessed revolutionaries. 
 Both waded into the chosen careers with death to 
 conventionalities emblazoned on their standards. 
 Both were bent on and succeeded in making a 
 mighty noise in the world. Both have thriven on 
 abuse. Both have exploited the vehicle which has 
 given them most of their vogue, the stage, as a 
 weapon for hitting at their critics. Shaw has 
 already collaborated with one Strauss—Oskar—in 
 the production of a musical play; at least Anns and 
 the Man furnished the plot. What a riot of audacity 
 the phantasy of a grand opera by Richard Strauss, 
 book by Bernard Shaw, conjures up! The gaiety 
 of nations, preceding additions to the contrary 
 notwithstanding, would hardly have seen its like 
 before. 
 
 Dr. Strauss’ place among the elite of his profes¬ 
 sion has been secure now for much more than a 
 decade. It was not easily or rapidly acquired. The 
 German Emperor and Empress, for example, even 
 yet consider him too seditiously modern to merit 
 their Imperial patronage, though Salome, Electra, 
 The Rose Cavalier and Ariadne auf Naxos, at raised 
 prices, are the most potent diminishers of deficits at 
 the Kaiser’s royal opera. The anti-Strauss school is 
 still numerous and highly articulate. But his star 
 
 98 
 

RICHARD STRAUSS 
 
 has long since been irresistibly in the ascendant, 
 and two hemispheres have accepted him as the 
 Mcister of the generation. There is disagreement 
 only as to whether Strauss’ gifts are those of 
 genius or merely of talent. 
 
 If Strauss had not elected to seek fame chiefly as 
 a composer he would have challenged the world’s 
 attention as a conductor. Many acclaim him as 
 Europe’s peerless orchestral leader. Totally devoid 
 of mannerisms and ostentation, he directs with a 
 sovereignty which stamps a symphonic or operatic 
 score with incomparable individuality. Whether it 
 be Verdi or Gounod or himself that he is interpret¬ 
 ing, there is a sureness about his readings which 
 both instrumentalists and singers will tell you 
 invariably makes for superior performance. Strauss’ 
 career as a conductor began in 1885 under Hans 
 von Billow, at whose invitation the young composer 
 led the Meiningen Court orchestra at a concert, 
 which included a four-movement suite of his own 
 for wind instruments. To Billow Strauss himself 
 is disposed to give much of the credit for implanting 
 in him the seeds of ultra-modernity, of which he 
 has become the arch-priest. 
 
 Dr. Strauss’ highly developed sense of the com¬ 
 mercial beauty of art cannot be traced to any of 
 the causes which have acquainted so many geniuses 
 with the woes of poverty. He was born with a 
 baton in his hand and a check-book in his mouth, 
 for his father was a Munich orchestra-player and 
 his mother a Pschorr, a daughter of the immensely 
 
 99 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 wealthy brewery dynasty which helped to make 
 Bavaria famous. Strauss is several times a million¬ 
 aire in German marks. His inherited fortune has 
 been vastly increased by rich song and operatic 
 royalties, and by astute investments, in which he is 
 understood to enjoy the counsel of a well-known 
 London banker and transportation magnate. Strauss 
 approaches the task of selling an opera with the 
 finesse of a Wall Street trust magnate. The con¬ 
 tracts he submitted to an American manager for 
 the production of The Rose Cavalier in London and 
 New York would have done credit to the Standard 
 Oil Company. 
 
 Dr. Strauss’ determination to make America pay 
 famine prices for the privilege of hearing The Rose 
 Cavalier, which is still unproduced there, may be 
 due to the grudge he bears Uncle Sam for the early 
 rejection of Salome. The Metropolitan Opera of 
 New York, after having rehearsed Salome, sup¬ 
 pressed it on grounds of blasphemy and immorality. 
 Asked what he thought of the boycott, Strauss 
 replied: “Of all human vices the most detestable 
 to me is hypocrisy.” 
 
 Like all the truly great, a whole literature of 
 anecdotes has grown up around Strauss. For the 
 most part they concern his revolutionary artistic 
 canons. Many are true; others, so characteristic 
 that they deserve to be. One of the best rests on 
 fact. After the Kaiser had heard Salome, he 
 remarked to the impresario who produced it: 
 “I’m sure I don’t know what Strauss is trying to 
 
 ioo 
 
RICHARD STRAUSS 
 
 convey, but he writes excellent marches.” Due, 
 it is reputed, to the lively repugnance of the Kaiserin 
 for Strauss and all his works, the Kaiser has never 
 honoured the composer with the Imperial favour. 
 Royal auditors are rare at Strauss productions at 
 the Berlin Opera, though the composer holds the 
 rank of general music director at the temple of 
 operatic art, which His Majesty subsidises. It was 
 many years before Strauss could break into the 
 charmed circle of immortals who claim membership 
 in the Berlin Academy. Unpopularity in exalted 
 quarters was commonly ascribed as the reason for 
 his ostracism. 
 
 Strauss makes no secret of his passion for the 
 bizarre in orchestral effects, of which he is primarily 
 a master-builder. He is at the zenith of his creative 
 glory when evolving weird themes or Niagara roars 
 from demoniacal blendings of reeds, winds, strings 
 and brasses. Tearing down the centre aisle of the 
 Royal Opera at Dresden during the general re¬ 
 hearsal of Electra, that monumental example of 
 musical uproar, Dr. Strauss suddenly commanded a 
 halt in the performance. Madame Schumann-Heink, 
 the Clytemnestra, was in the throes of a tumultuous 
 aria. Beads of perspiration already bespangled the 
 brows of the hard-working orchestra. “Louder, 
 louder!” shrieked Strauss. “I can still hear the 
 singing!” When Salome was in rehearsal, the 
 tenor who was struggling with the Herod role 
 strayed far from the key. The conductor stopped 
 short to bring the wayward one back to the score. 
 
 IOI 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 Strauss interposed. “Grossartig!” he exclaimed. 
 “Burrian has given just the effect I wanted!” 
 Prof. Heinrich Griinfeld, a Berlin ’cellist, who 
 fiddles and tells stories equally well, summed up the 
 philosophy of the anti-Strauss school after hearing 
 The Rose Cavalier. That tuneful creation was 
 Strauss’ first concession to melody in opera as 
 distinguished from sheer thematic idiosyncrasies. 
 It contains a Viennese waltz number which would 
 fit into The Merry Widow or The Chocolate Soldier 
 as if made for them. Asked his opinion of The 
 Rose Cavalier, Griinfeld said: “Well, if it has to 
 be Richard, then I prefer Wagner; if it has to 
 be Strauss, give me Johann.” 
 
 Strauss is forty-nine years old this summer. 
 His admirers, now legion, have every reason to 
 hope that he is only at the threshold of his most 
 productive years. He divides his time between his 
 idyllic summer home at Garmisch, one of the pic¬ 
 turesque villages of the Upper Tyrol, in his native 
 Bavaria, and a suburban menage in Berlin when 
 not concertising abroad. It is at Villa Garmisch 
 where Strauss does most of his composing, amid an 
 ultra-exclusive privacy which only the favoured few 
 are privileged to invade. The decorative features 
 of the house are completely at variance with the 
 sacrilegious ideals which popular misconception 
 associates with the composer of Salome, for the 
 gems of Strauss’ art collections are pictures of 
 saints and sacred subjects of all kinds. Almost every 
 available inch of wall space is plastered with them, 
 
 102 
 
RICHARD STRAUSS 
 
 mostly paintings on the reverse side of glass, 
 through which the brilliant colours are effectively 
 reflected. The only secular personage in this com¬ 
 pany of martyrs is Frederick the Great, one of 
 Strauss’ heroes. The composer’s study is a baronial 
 hall sort of apartment, with huge windows looking 
 out on the glorious panorama of the Kramar Moun¬ 
 tains at the foot of which Villa Garmisch nestles. 
 A spreading writing table, littered with manuscript, 
 a grand piano, a music-stand, an inconspicuous set 
 of book shelves, and a few landscapes comprise the 
 furnishings of the wizard’s workshop. Strauss is a 
 clever pianist and strums his themes before reducing 
 them to notes and bars. His hobby is Skat, the 
 German national card game, which he plays passion¬ 
 ately and well. He is invariably armed with paper 
 and pencil for the jotting down of spur-of-the- 
 moment inspirations. The Leitmotif of Electra, 
 he says, came to him during a game of Skat. It 
 must have been a particularly tempestuous round. 
 
 “At Garmisch,” Strauss once imparted to a 
 visitor, “thanks to my dear wife, who is a true 
 intellectual companion for me, and thanks to my 
 beloved boy, I have that delightful peace which I 
 long for and need. Here composition comes easiest 
 for me, and this is my favourite place for working, 
 even in winter. As for the rest, I compose every¬ 
 where, in noisy international hotels, in my garden 
 and in railway carriages. My notebook is always 
 with me, whether I am walking or riding, eating or 
 drinking; I am never without it, and as soon as a 
 
 103 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 suitable motive for the theme upon which I am 
 working occurs to me, it is entrusted to my most 
 faithful companion. The ideas that I note down 
 are only sketches, which I arrange afterward, but 
 before I improvise the least preparatory sketch of 
 an opera, I occupy myself for six months with the 
 text. I simply steep myself in it, and study into 
 the situations and characters down to the finest 
 detail. Then I begin to give rein to my musical 
 thoughts. From my memoranda I make sketches, 
 which are afterward copied and joined together in 
 the piano part, which I alter and re-edit four times. 
 That is the exhausting part of the work; what 
 follows, the score, the great colour scheme for the 
 orchestra, is for me recreation and refreshes me 
 again. I write on the score continuously and with¬ 
 out any difficulty, keeping at it in my workroom 
 twelve hours on a stretch. In this way I attain 
 uniformity, which is the chief requisite. In this 
 many of our composers are lacking. If they would 
 take any part of a Wagner tone-drama or a Mozart 
 finale as an example, they could not fail to recognise 
 and admire the unity in all parts. It is like a gar¬ 
 ment made from one kind of material. Many of 
 our composers seek to dazzle us with detached ideas, 
 melodies that appear here and there and are at 
 once striking. The effect is like a garment made 
 of odd pieces, among which many may be very 
 pretty and brilliant in colour; but all the same it 
 is only patchwork.” 
 
 Modern and retiring, Strauss has the geniality 
 104 
 
RICHARD STRAUSS 
 
 as well as the brogue of his beloved South Germany, 
 and likes best the companionship of kindred artistic 
 spirits. He is bored to distraction by the wiles of 
 would-be lionisers. A sycophantic admirer who 
 once assured him that he was the Buddha of modern 
 music was told in reply: “I’m not so sure about 
 that, but I know who the pest is.” Strauss is a 
 prodigious worker and composes at lightning speed. 
 He has been known simply to dash off great songs. 
 Feuersnot, Salome, Electra, The Rose Cavalier and 
 Ariadne span a period of less than eleven years. 
 He is a stickler for regular habits, and always takes 
 a “rest cure” of several weeks before dedicating 
 himself to a great work like a new opera. Then 
 it absorbs him undividedly. One of his striking 
 qualities is bland composure. At rehearsals, when 
 even the imperturbable Reinhardt, who with 
 Hofmannsthal, librettist, completes the Strauss 
 operatic triumvirate, forgets himself and explodes, 
 Strauss sits unruffled till things right themselves. 
 
 Tall and gaunt, with receding hair, which is 
 beginning to look Beethovenesque in its scraggly 
 abandon, Strauss’ predominant physical feature is 
 a bulging convex forehead. From the grey matter 
 behind it, beyond all peradventure, creations 
 destined to add fresh lustre to his name will yet 
 spring. 
 
XIII 
 
 PROFESSOR DELBRUCK 
 
 I T was Lord Palmerston who once described 
 Germany as “that damned land of professors.” 
 In his mind were the luminaries of eighteenth 
 and nineteenth century Romanticism who blazed the 
 way for the physical, moral and political regenera¬ 
 tion which, in turn, was to crush the French op¬ 
 pressor, reconstruct Prussia, inaugurate an intellec¬ 
 tual renaissance, win the revolution of 1848, and 
 unify Germany. They were the “German ideolo¬ 
 gists” of Napoleon’s contempt, whom the Father- 
 land is canonising in this year of centenary— 
 Schleiermacher, the theologian, who, while the 
 supreme humilation of Jena still burnt in the soul 
 of his enslaved people, wrote that “Germany will 
 rise with unexpected might, worthy of her ancient 
 heroes and her inborn strength”; Fichte, the philos¬ 
 opher, who, in, his “Addresses to the Nation,” 
 aroused his shackled and despoiled countrymen to 
 “replace what they had lost in the physical resources 
 by moral strength,” and told the downtrodden 
 Germans that it was “they on whom the future of 
 the world depended”; Alexander von Humboldt, 
 who co-operated with Schleiermacher and Fichte 
 
 106 
 
PROFESSOR DELBRUCK 
 
 in the establishment of the University of Berlin, 
 and with them preached the gospel of public educa¬ 
 tion as the true basis of national greatness; Savigny, 
 the jurist; Nietzsche, “that half-inspired, half-crazy 
 poet-philosopher’’; Virchow, Treitschke and Momm¬ 
 sen, the outstanding triumvirate of the Bismarck- 
 ian era. These were the field-marshals of German 
 thought before and during the blood and iron age. 
 They are long since gathered to their fathers, but 
 their ideals survive. 
 
 To-day it is still the professors who expound the 
 doctrine that the Germans are the Urvolk, to whom 
 the great heritage belongs. The ascendancy of no 
 single other caste excels their influence on affairs 
 of State. Professors of divinity and history are 
 among the favourite councillors of the Kaiser. A 
 professor has become Prime Minister of Bavaria. 
 Another has represented Germany at two Hague 
 Conferences. Still another co-operates in the leader¬ 
 ship of the National Liberal Party. It is from 
 Harnack, Delitzsch and Pfleiderer, the theologians; 
 from Wagner, Schmoller and Bernhard, the politi¬ 
 cal-economists; from Schiemann, Meyer and Del- 
 briick, the historians; from Haeckel and Ostwald, 
 the philosophers; from Zorn, Kohler and Von Liszt, 
 the jurists, that modern, mighty, material Germany 
 derives its chief intellectual inspiration. Mr. Arnold 
 Bennett might write another “Milestones” round 
 the unerring accuracy with which the history of 
 German thought-moulding has repeated itself. As 
 the professors of 1813 vowed to Vassal Prussia that 
 
 107 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 her day would yet dawn, so it is their progeny in 
 the Kaiser’s epoch which is educating the nation 
 to believe in the glory that will be Germany’s when 
 the British Empire crumbles and the Monroe Doc¬ 
 trine is blown into oblivion. It is they who are 
 inculcating in Germans the sinfulness of arbitration 
 treaties and the blessings of armaments. 
 
 Foremost among the apostles of the forward 
 movement in Germany in the age of Tirpitz and 
 Ballin is Professor Plans Delbriick, successor of 
 Treitschke in the Chair of History at the University 
 of Berlin. He stands out from among the scholarly 
 many because of his independence, influence and 
 wider audience. His fellow professors confine 
 their activities more or less to guiding the flower 
 of German intelligence as it filters through their 
 class-rooms at the Universities. In the Prcussisclie 
 Jahrbiicher, the monthly review which he edits, 
 Delbriick addresses the country. The master of a 
 trenchant pen, he does not indulge in the tricks of 
 language one encounters in the Zukunft, nor splutter 
 with the vehemence of Harden, and his views are 
 immeasurably more representative of authoritative 
 opinion. A fervid apostle of Greater Germany, 
 Delbriick is neither a Pan-German nor a Jingo. 
 When he speaks, you hear the voice of the ruling 
 classes. 
 
 Fearlessness is Delbriick’s distinguishing charac¬ 
 teristic. He remains an intrepid disciple of the 
 Hegel philosophy, despite modern views of its 
 heresy. No publicist reared in such intimate con- 
 
 108 
 
PROFESSOR DELBRUCK 
 
 tact with the powers—he was long a member of the 
 Imperial household in the capacity of a teacher— 
 sails so close as Delbriick to the wind of frank 
 expression. Nominally a Staatsbeamtcr, as a mem¬ 
 ber of the faculty of a Prussian university, he tilts 
 at Government gleefully. His political foes once 
 labelled him the attorney-general of the Social 
 Democrats, Poles, Guelphs and other enemies of 
 the existing order. They have never forgiven 
 his assertion that the Socialist Party became an 
 indispensable factor in German politics after the 
 Reichstag, under its aggressive leadership, rejected 
 the Government’s notorious Lex Hcinse which 
 would have thrown back German literary and artistic 
 development ioo years. 
 
 To-day Delbriick is the spokesman-in-chief of 
 that overwhelming body of German public sentiment 
 which insistently clamours for “more room in the 
 sun,” and the right to wrest it by force of arms if 
 need be. An encyclopaedic symposium could not 
 more exhaustively interpret Germany’s world- 
 grievances and world-ambitions than the terse 
 presentation of the case given me by Delbriick a 
 few months ago. 
 
 “The German people,” he said, “since attaining 
 unity as a great nation, have gradually reached the 
 determination not to permit the world to be 
 divided up among other Powers, but to de¬ 
 mand their portion of it. Since 1871, particularly 
 within the past fifteen years, enormous and pro¬ 
 ductive territories have been continually seized 
 
 109 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 or occupied by strong nations. Britain has con¬ 
 quered a new Empire in South Africa. America 
 has acquired the Philippines, the Hawaiian Islands 
 and Porto Rico, and imposed her hegemony over 
 the West Indies and Central America. Japan 
 has annexed Corea and is dividing Manchuria and 
 Mongolia with Russia. England and Russia are 
 absorbing Persia. France has pocketed Morocco. 
 Austria-Hungary has annexed Bosnia and Herze¬ 
 govina. Italy has taken Tripoli. The Balkan 
 States have partitioned the Turkish Empire. All 
 these are natural processes. Germany has no 
 reason to oppose them. But she wants her share. 
 For this object she needs a fleet. 
 
 “England in particular, and nearly all other 
 Powers, still refuse to recognise the natural demand 
 of Germany for full equality in world politics. 
 That was demonstrated afresh in the Morocco 
 affair, when by supporting France in order to reduce 
 our ‘compensation’ demands to the minimum in¬ 
 stead of acknowledging their reasonableness, Britain 
 proved that she was our inveterate enemy. Ger¬ 
 many’s inevitable answer was a fresh increase in 
 both her Army and Navy. 
 
 “Mr. Balfour tells us we must not expect English¬ 
 men to support our aims in the direction of terri¬ 
 torial expansion. What remains then for us, ex¬ 
 cept to enforce the accomplishment of our purposes 
 by strengthened armaments? You ask on what terms 
 Germany wants peace and friendship with England. 
 Well, for one thing, we cannot and will not ever 
 
 no 
 
PROFESSOR DELBRUCK 
 
 again tolerate such malicious interference with 
 legitimate German aspirations as British interven¬ 
 tion in our negotiations with France in 1911. Eng¬ 
 land must abandon her dog-in-the-manger attitude 
 of uncompromising hostility if war between us is 
 to be averted. Enmity to Germany must no longer 
 be the keynote of British foreign policy. All this 
 must change if Europe is to be relieved of the night¬ 
 mare which has hung over it for more than a decade. 
 We do not ask that the change take specific form. 
 All we wish is that a different British spirit shall pre¬ 
 vail when international issues are under discussion. 
 We are tired of meeting British obstruction at every 
 turning—whether it be Walfisch Bay, the Baghdad 
 Railway, Morocco, China, the Persian Gulf, the 
 Portuguese colonies, or wherever else German dip¬ 
 lomacy presumes to show its hand. All we expect 
 from England is what Mr. Roosevelt calls ‘a square 
 deal.’ 
 
 “The world’s theory that Germany is land-hun¬ 
 gry is a myth. Germany is a land of immigration, 
 not emigration. Our total emigration has fallen 
 to about 25,000. To us every year come hundreds 
 of thousands of immigrant labourers from the 
 East. We want markets, not territory. That was 
 the mainspring of our rencontre with France over 
 Morocco. We want no coaling stations in remote 
 corners of the seven seas. Coaling stations mean 
 fortifications and garrisons—burial grounds for 
 subsidies in peace and vulnerable outposts in war. 
 
 “Will Britons never rid themselves of the night- 
 111 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 mare that Germany wants war with England? We 
 do not want war with England because we know 
 perfectly well that it has nothing to bring us, even 
 if we should win. Could we take and hold Egypt 
 perhaps, or Ireland, or British South Africa, or 
 Canada, or Australia? Is the German regime so 
 beloved by the Arabs, the Irish, the Dutch, or the 
 French-Canadians, or the Britons oversea, that 
 they would accept it without making us fight, 
 and fight interminably, to impose it upon them? 
 If Germany humbled Britain in war, it would not 
 be six months before we should find ourselves 
 precisely in the desperate position of Napoleon I.— 
 the masters of Europe, with all Europe united to 
 encompass our overthrow. That is a vision the 
 business Germany, the sane and sensible Germany 
 of 1913, conjures up, only to banish as wild and 
 irresponsible. 
 
 “Let me summarise: The abandonment of un¬ 
 worthy suspicions; the acknowledgment of our right 
 to grow and to participate in shaping the world’s 
 destinies; the expression of an honest desire to 
 reach an understanding; formal diplomatic steps 
 in that direction; simultaneous withdrawal of 
 arbitrary opposition to legitimate German political 
 aspirations—those are the things we await from 
 England. If she has no inclination to meet us on 
 that ground, if her interests rather point to a 
 perpetuation of the anything-to-beat-Germany 
 policy, so let it be. The Armageddon which must 
 then, some day, ensue will not be of our making.” 
 
 112 
 
PROFESSOR DELBRUCK 
 
 Professor Delbruck is in his sixty-fifth year. He 
 is one of the Germans who have solved the problem 
 of growing old gracefully and keeping their pristine 
 energy at concert-pitch. An indefatigable reader 
 and writer, he gives much of his time to the recep¬ 
 tion of distinguished foreign visitors anxious to 
 hear straightforward German public opinion at the 
 fountain head. His workshop is a picturesque 
 home in the Grunewald forest on the western out¬ 
 skirts of Berlin, not far from that other intrepid 
 matador, Maximilian Harden. Its tables and shelves 
 are usually crammed with English, French and 
 American books, periodicals and newspapers. Del- 
 briick keeps thoroughly abreast of thought and 
 movements abroad. 
 
 Delbruck first saw the light on the Baltic island 
 of Riigen, off the coast of Pomerania, in 1848. 
 Born in the year of Prussian revolution, the spirit 
 of independence which stirred German souls in 
 those troublous hours seems to have infected his 
 whole being. The ideals of the ’48-ers are the ones 
 for which Delbriick has been a protagonist all his 
 life—a sane democracy at home and untrammelled 
 liberty of action for Germans abroad. He inter¬ 
 rupted his University studies in 1870 to participate 
 as a reserve-lieutenant in the Franco-Prussian War. 
 Having sheathed his sword, he has been fighting 
 ever since with a pen no less mighty. For five 
 years he was attached to the family of the late 
 Emperor and Empress Frederick as tutor to their 
 son, Prince Waldemar, since deceased. For nine 
 
 113 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 years Delbriick sat in the Prussian Diet and the 
 Reichstag. He is a brother-in-law of Professor 
 Adolf Harnack, the eminent theologian, and with 
 him enjoys a privileged position in the councils of 
 the Court and Government. The Delbriick family 
 has long been prominent in German intellectual and 
 official life. A kinsman of the Professor is at pres¬ 
 ent Vice-Chancellor and Imperial Home Secretary. 
 
XIV 
 
 AUGUST SCHERL 
 
 T HERE is a sedate and sober daily paper in 
 Berlin called Germania, the organ of the 
 all-powerful Roman Catholic Centre 
 Party, which is said to receive a news telegram on 
 the average once every thirty years—whenever a 
 Pope dies. Throughout the uneventful decades 
 meantime, its columns are rarely burdened with 
 what The Times has immortalised as Latest Intelli¬ 
 gence. The conditions peculiar to Germania were 
 characteristic of all German journalism a generation 
 ago. Until the present Kaiser’s reign, newspapers 
 depended on the colourless and hackneyed reports 
 furnished by the semi-official Wolff Telegraph 
 Agency, whose methods are still ante-bellum. 
 Instead of news, readers were mostly regaled with 
 ponderous leading articles of erudite hue. A journal 
 with a circulation of 50,000 was a marvel. Those 
 which could boast of 5,000 were considered lucky. 
 They were the benighted days when Germans did 
 not take in papers of their own, but preferred to 
 yawn over free copies at a coffee-house or their 
 favourite beer resort. 
 
 To-day Berlin has six dailies with circulations 
 ranging from 150,000 to 400,000. Hamburg, 
 
 115 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 Frankfort, Cologne, Breslau, Leipzig and Dresden 
 have journals which publish more than 100,000 
 copies a day. Latest Intelligence is not yet as 
 common a commodity as in London, New York and 
 Paris, but the make-up of the modern German daily 
 is vastly different from the dreary and newsless 
 columns of olden times. Two or three compare 
 favourably in all respects with the “livest” of their 
 metropolitan confreres abroad. 
 
 For the revolution worked in German journalism 
 one man is primarily responsible, August Scherl, 
 founder and proprietor of the Berliner Lokal- 
 Anzeiger. Scherl, the son of a Diisseldorf book- 
 dealer, arrived in Berlin penniless, but rich in ideas 
 in the early ’eighties. By 1890 he had completely 
 reformed German newspaper standards. He human¬ 
 ised journalism. He thought and proved that the 
 time had come to give the public more news and less 
 views. He found the post too slow for newspaper 
 purposes, and proceeded to harness to them the 
 cable, the telegraph and the telephone. The first 
 daily issue of the Lokal-Anzeiger, which began as 
 a weekly two years previous, burst upon Berlin in 
 August, 1885. It was hailed as “scandalously 
 sensational,” and was nicknamed Skandal-Anzeiger. 
 The burghers who had been raised on a newspaper 
 diet of Schopenhauer, Kant and Treitschke rubbed 
 their eyes and shook their heads. They were 
 shocked to find themselves in twenty-four hour, 
 instead of weekly or fortnightly, touch with the 
 great world outside Berlin and beyond Germany. 
 
 116 
 
AUGUST SCHERL 
 
 A new era had obviously dawned. The Lokal- 
 Anzciger found a clientele ready-made for it. Its 
 novel political policy—none at all—won instanta¬ 
 neous favour. The public was waiting for a paper 
 which specialised in news and purveyed it, regard¬ 
 less of the stilted and partisan ’isms which hitherto 
 had permeated the columns of the German press. 
 Scherl was doing for Germany what the Bennetts 
 and the Pulitzers were doing for America, and what 
 the Harmsworths were about to do for England. 
 
 Not only was Scherl’s conception of what a news¬ 
 paper ought to contain radically at variance with 
 traditions, but he invented the idea of bringing the 
 paper to the reader instead of waiting to have it 
 asked for. Circulation-seeking had been as far 
 beneath the dignity of the German fourth estate 
 as news. Scherl went gunning for subscribers and 
 got them. He organised the first modern system 
 of newspaper-delivery, employing for the purpose 
 women, who are still the “newsboys” of the Father- 
 land. He established neighbourhood branch offices 
 far and wide, in order to lay papers at subscribers’ 
 doors with all possible dispatch. He printed special 
 editions during the twenty-four hours preceding 
 the appearance of next morning’s paper, and 
 astonished a community unaccustomed to getting 
 anything for nothing by giving away “extras.” He 
 added a supplement to the Lokal-Anseigcr, contain¬ 
 ing help-wanted advertisements, and distributed it 
 gratis in the working-class districts. Separate 
 sheets dealing with news exclusively of interest to 
 
 ii 7 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 particular sections of Berlin and the suburbs were 
 folded into the regular edition of the Lokal- 
 Anzciger. A dispatch bureau was opened in Unter 
 den Linden for the display of world-news from 
 hour to hour. Scherl’s innovations seemed to know 
 no limits. It was small wonder that the Lokal- 
 Anzeiger’s family of readers grew by leaps. People 
 continued to read Aunt Voss, as the classical 
 Vossische Zcitung was known, and the Kreuz 
 Zcitung, the Conservative thunderer, for literature, 
 metaphysics and philosophy, but they took the 
 Lokal-Anzciger for news. 
 
 In 1889, four years after its establishment, the 
 Lokal-Anzciger found it necessary to convert its 
 daily into morning and evening editions, which 
 Scherl, now the recognised Napoleon of the craft, 
 offered to subscribers at the rate of a shilling a 
 month, inclusive of a special Sunday edition. 
 With the appearance of the twice-a-day paper, its 
 news service was expanded afresh. Scherl had long 
 been spending money freely on news gathering. 
 He discovered that 100 marks invested in Latest 
 Intelligence produced better results for him and 
 vastly more interest for his readers than heavy 
 literature dealing with high politics or the higher 
 criticism. He appointed correspondents in all the 
 German towns and cities. He sent representatives 
 of his own to foreign capitals, and cautioned them 
 to spend money on telegraphing news. The special 
 correspondent, an old institution abroad, was 
 practically unknown in Germany. The Cologne 
 
 118 
 
AUGUST SCHERL 
 
 Gazette, the Frankfurter Zcitung, and one or two 
 others had had “specials” at the Franco-German 
 War, but Scherl was the first to realise that the 
 public had interest in events less catastrophic than 
 war, and dispatched special correspondents broad¬ 
 cast to report earthquakes, floods, revolutions, 
 political crises, historic functions of State, royal 
 pilgrimages and other world-happenings which 
 to-day are as exhaustively “covered” as used to be 
 the sleepy meetings of the Potsdam town council. 
 Nowadays Lokal-Anzciger “specials” rush to the 
 farthermost corners of the earth in quest of news. 
 The ablest of them, Otto von Gottberg, has not 
 missed an event of international magnitude in 
 fifteen years. 
 
 Along with modernisation of news gathering and 
 news vending, Scherl resorted to up-to-date methods 
 in the mechanical department of newspaper pro¬ 
 duction. The Lokal-Anzeigcr was the first German 
 paper to banish hand typesetting and instal 
 linotypes. Scherl introduced newspaper-photog¬ 
 raphy in his country, and duplicated the success 
 of the Lokal-Anzeiger as a daily with an illustrated 
 weekly, Die IVoche, which is still the leading 
 periodical of its class. Then he launched a picture 
 daily, Der Tag, which spread far and wide the fame 
 of the two-colour printing process invented in 
 Germany. Year after year Scherl brought out new 
 publications till he had exploited almost every 
 important field of human activity. To-day he 
 owns five dailies and a dozen weeklies, the latter 
 
 119 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 including the chief illustrated sporting weekly, Sport 
 in Bild, and Gartenlaube, the most widely read 
 family periodical, with a colossal circulation. Scherl 
 branch offices are scattered all over the Empire. 
 There are forty-two in Greater Berlin and two hun¬ 
 dred and fifty in the provinces. The Scherl publica¬ 
 tions, which since 1894 have been the nominal 
 property of a limited company, also include the city 
 directories of Berlin and a dozen other cities. Their 
 home is an enormous complex of buildings in the 
 heart of Berlin’s business district and the working 
 staff exceeds five thousand men and women. 
 
 Herr Scherl is a unique mixture of the sentimental 
 and practical. He has made a huge fortune from 
 his properties, but almost every one of them, 
 beginning with the epoch-making Lokal-Anzeiger, 
 has sprung from an idealistic desire to make the 
 lot of the masses happier and easier. It was from 
 such motives that he founded his popular circulating 
 library, evolved a new system of people’s savings 
 banks, advocated communal theatres for the pro¬ 
 letariat, and launched an ambitious project for 
 rapid transit in cities by means of the monorail, in 
 which he is an enthusiastic believer, as he demon¬ 
 strated by acquiring the patents for the best system 
 extarrt. He was one of the pioneers of airmanship 
 in Germany, and organized “flying weeks” in the 
 early days, to educate his countrymen to the 
 importance of the aeroplane. 
 
 Actively identified as August Scherl has been with 
 the development of modern Germany, there are 
 
 120 
 
AUGUST SCHERL 
 
 probably not a hundred men who knew him by sight. 
 Society sees him not at all. He is, in fact, a hermit. 
 He is harder to get to than the Kaiser. Field- 
 Marshal von Waldersee, fresh from the glories of 
 the China campaign in 1900, tried for four weeks 
 to meet the Newspaper King and failed. In recent 
 years Scherl has directed most of the affairs of 
 his vast enterprise from the study of his private 
 dwelling, which is closed hermetically to everybody 
 but private secretaries. Yet no detail of his 
 vast business escapes him. He is still the great 
 producer of ideas for it, and holds all the various 
 reins of its activities in his own resourceful hands. 
 The flashes of genius and enterprise which 
 periodically emanate from Zimmer-strasse, Berlin’s 
 Fleet Street, originate with him. He usually 
 thinks and sees months and miles ahead of rival 
 publishers. Of course, he has many imitators 
 and worthy competitors now, whom he has forced 
 to spend money and invent novelties, in order to keep 
 the pace he has set them. The Berliner Tageblatt, 
 under the brilliant editorship of Theodor Wolff, is 
 probably the best all-round newspaper in Germany, 
 and Messrs. Ullstein, of Berlin, are in many respects 
 the most progressive newspaper publishers. The 
 Lokal-Anseiger no longer has the field to itself, but 
 Scherl blazed the tvay for the successes and fortunes 
 of all the rest. He is sixty-three years old, and still 
 in the prime. 
 
 English and American readers have long seen the 
 Lokal-Anseiger described as semi-official. No other 
 
 121 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 newspaper is in closer confidential relationship to 
 the powers that be than the leading Scherl organ. 
 The Court and the Government recognize the power 
 inherent in a popular daily of immense circulation, 
 and regularly use the Lokal-Anzeiger for “inspired” 
 news and views, in preference to the North German 
 Gazette, the official mouthpiece and denial machine. 
 
 Scherl’s hobby is the birds. Periodically during 
 the year an appealing line in bold-faced type stares 
 Berliners in the face at a dozen points in their 
 Lokal-Anzeiger. It runs, “Remember the Birds.” 
 Scherl once robbed a bird’s-nest. Remorse over 
 his youthful pranks haunted him in early man¬ 
 hood, and he resolved to make the welfare of 
 the birds a feature of his life-work. One of the 
 many Scherl stories has it that he takes keen 
 delight now and then in buying out the entire stock 
 of an aviary and setting the caged creatures free 
 in the sunny Tiergarten. 
 
 Few of the men around the Kaiser have done 
 more in the making of Modern Germany than the 
 bird-lover of the Zimmer-strasse, whose name has 
 become a household word everywhere where his 
 language is read and spoken. 
 
XV 
 
 PRINCE VON BUELOW 
 
 P RINCE BERNHARD VON BUELOW, 
 fourth Chancellor of the German Empire, 
 relinquished office on July 14th, 1909, but 
 the actual date of his political demise was 
 November 17th, 1908. It was on that day that he 
 undertook his fateful journey to Potsdam in the 
 midst of the “Kaiser Crisis” provoked by the Daily 
 Telegraph interview, to extort from his Imperial 
 master a pledge of “greater reserve” in the dis¬ 
 cussion and conduct of the nation’s affairs. The 
 Imperial Gazette proclaimed that the Kaiser had 
 assured the man with the muzzle of his “continued 
 confidence,” but Buelow actually lay in extremis 
 from the moment he quit his chastened Sovereign’s 
 presence. His early disappearance from the place 
 he had adorned for ten years became a foregone 
 conclusion. 
 
 Throughout his long career the goddess of fortune 
 lavished her capricious smiles on Buelow so faith¬ 
 fully that he came to be known as Bernhard the 
 Lucky. His rise in the diplomatic service from an 
 humble attacheship to the Foreign Secretaryship, 
 the warm favour of the Kaiser, his extended tenure 
 of the Imperial Chancellorship, his successive eleva- 
 
 123 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 tions to the rank of Count and Prince, his Parlia¬ 
 mentary triumphs, his feat in arresting the rising 
 tide of Social Democracy, his inheritance of a great 
 fortune—all these episodes were hailed by com¬ 
 patriots as evidence that Buelow led a charmed life, 
 and that the pitfalls which ordinarily bring states¬ 
 men to earth were but stepping stones for him. 
 
 Though the “November storm” undid him, 
 fortune’s favourite was not to be left in the lurch; 
 he was vouchsafed an exit from political life 
 which historians will not place to his discredit. 
 Germany’s chaotic Imperial finances were to be 
 “reformed” by the imposition of $125,000,000 of 
 fresh taxes to meet the deficits resultant from the 
 Dreadnaught era. Prince Buelow insisted that the 
 great landed classes should bear their share of the 
 burden, and proposed an Inheritance Tax as the 
 fairest means of assessing them. The Agrarian 
 aristocracy, the self-appointed guardians of Throne, 
 conscience and patriotism in Prussia-Germany, 
 revolted against the Chancellor’s designs on the 
 revenue of Junkers yet unborn. Moreover, Buelow’s 
 “treason” to the Kaiser rankled in their monarchical 
 bosoms. Secretly and gnawingly the Conservatives 
 were awaiting their chance to send the Chancellor 
 to the guillotine. The Finance Reform Bill was 
 their opportunity. Locking arms with the Roman 
 Catholic Centre, against which Buelow had governed 
 precariously since the previous general election, 
 rebellious Blue combined with revengeful Black 
 against the Inheritance Tax, on which the Chancellor 
 
 124 
 
PRINCE VON BUELOW 
 
 had formally staked his official existence. Unavail¬ 
 ing was the impressive Swan Song he delivered 
 from his familiar place at the corner of the Govern¬ 
 ment bench. “My own position,” he assured the 
 Reichstag, “is entirely secondary to the prompt 
 adoption of the Finance Reform scheme. If I 
 should be convinced that my person stands in the 
 way, that somebody else can reach the goal more 
 easily, or if things should develop so that I could 
 not, or would not, any longer co-operate, I shall be 
 able to induce the Emperor to see that my retire¬ 
 ment is opportune. I hope my successor may do his 
 duty to the Empire as loyally and honourably as I 
 have tried to do.” 
 
 Resignation in more senses than one rang clarion 
 from this simple manifesto. The Inheritance Tax 
 was defeated. Refusing to identify himself with a 
 Finance Reform which shouldered disproportionate 
 burdens on the masses, Buelow asked the Kaiser 
 for his discharge. Of the Sovereign who had been 
 not only master, but comrade, and had surfeited him 
 with the highest honours within his majestic gift, 
 Buelow took leave under unconventional circum¬ 
 stances in the garden of Berlin Schloss on a mid¬ 
 summer day, while the gaping populace looked on 
 from across the placid Spree. As the Chancellor, 
 grave of countenance and bearing a huge white 
 envelope containing his resignation, entered, the 
 Kaiser advanced to meet him, shook hands cordially, 
 and, linking his right arm with the Prince’s left, 
 walked up and down the terrace, conversing 
 
 125 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 animatedly for the matter of twenty minutes. 
 Now and then the Emperor punctuated his discourse 
 with characteristic gestures with the clenched fist. 
 When the walk and talk were ended, the Kaiser 
 embraced his old-time friend and councillor, wrung 
 his hand warmly in farewell grasp, and escorted 
 him to the gate. 
 
 Chancellors before and since Buelow have been 
 defeated in the Reichstag and survived, proud 
 Bismarck among them. Germany has a Parliament, 
 but no Parliamentary government. There was 
 neither law nor tradition compelling Buelow to 
 respond to the miscarriage of the Inheritance Tax 
 with his resignation. Realising that his status with 
 the Kaiser was irreparably shattered, Buelow simply 
 seized upon a casual Reichstag vote of mistrust as a 
 providential parachute to oblivion. His going is 
 officially indexed in German political history under 
 the rubric of Finance Reform. Actually it was 
 born of the implacability of monarchs and men 
 unforgiving both of muzzles and muzzlers. 
 
 Buelow was not infallible; yet Simplicissimas’ 
 recent jest—“Bernhard, come back! All is for¬ 
 given !”—like so much of the wisdom of the German 
 Punch, is unquestionably expressive of prevailing 
 public opinion of the fourth Chancellor and his 
 works. He has been almost greater in retirement 
 than in office. He has preserved a silence which 
 might make the Sphinxes blush. Efforts to draw 
 him on the questions which agitate Germany and 
 Europe prove as abortive as if addressed to a mute. 
 
 126 
 
PRINCE VON BUELOW 
 
 He once reminded Mr. Chamberlain that people 
 who cast aspersions on the honour and the humanity 
 of the German Army were biting on granite. 
 Equally impressionless are appeals to Buelow to 
 emerge from the retirement he has imposed upon 
 himself, and unburden his heart on the topics of the 
 day. Whether amid the solitude of the Roman villa 
 where, with his accomplished Italian wife, formerly 
 the Princess Maria Camporeale, he lives for six 
 months of the year, or at his German country home 
 at Klein-Flottbeck, near Hamburg, or alongside 
 the billows of the North Sea at Nordeney, where 
 he spends his summers, Buelow’s lips are hermeti¬ 
 cally sealed. If he cherishes resentment against 
 any living man, or has a view on any topic of past, 
 present or future importance for his fellow-men, or 
 a thought beyond the dimensions of a meteorological 
 pleasantry, he has kept it magnificently to himself. 
 Two of his predecessors did their talking out of 
 school in memoirs. Bismarck’s best ones, those 
 which tell of his dismissal, are still locked up in 
 the Bank of England, to be kept till the last person 
 therein mentioned is no more. Buelow’s recollec¬ 
 tions are stored in the strong-box of his soul. They 
 will make fascinating reading if he, too, some day, 
 like his immortal precursor, is moved to deal with 
 the last phase. 
 
 Prince Buelow is remembered best by those who 
 know him as the most urbane of men. He is by 
 far the most worldly of contemporary German 
 statesmen. He has the Parliamentary manner, 
 
 127 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 and would be equally at home as Premier or Leader 
 of the Opposition in a country where truly repre¬ 
 sentative Government prevails. There is none of 
 the narrow-mindedness of the typical German 
 politician in his make-up. At the Wilhelmstrasse 
 he was at ease alike with ambassadors of great 
 powers and wirepullers of domestic parties. He is 
 what Lord Morley, speaking of Disraeli, called a 
 master of the tedious art of managing men. Suavity 
 itself, nothing ever ruffled him. He turned the 
 most violent attacks in the Reichstag from a 
 Bebel or an Erzeberger into victory by a shrewd 
 retort or timely witticism. He is one of the few 
 real orators of a race which talks much but not 
 well. To hear his dialectics, richly seasoned with 
 quotations which he habitually affected, was not 
 always to hear a straightforward presentation of a 
 given issue, or one that went directly to the point, 
 but it was a treat to an ear which delights in 
 graceful language, repartee, imagery and rhetorical 
 gymnastics. He seldom took his seat without 
 scoring a triumph. And like Mr. Balfour, he 
 caressed the lapels of his frock-coat when on his 
 feet. 
 
 By the same arts he employed to tame the 
 Reichstag, he won an extraordinarily secure place 
 in the confidence and affection of the Kaiser. 
 “My Bernhard,” the Emperor used to call him. 
 No man better understood the psychology of 
 William II. It is related that Buelow used to secure 
 the Imperial assent on occasion between jokes, 
 
 128 
 
PRINCE VON BUELOW 
 
 which he told surpassingly well. He was a great 
 believer in the efficacy of cooking as an asset in 
 dealing with German politicians, and is said to have 
 overcome the opposition of a certain pompous M.P., 
 who still leads a forlorn hope known as National 
 Miserables, by inviting him to good dinners. 
 
 Prince Buelow, now sixty-four, traces his ancestry 
 back to the twelfth century. For generations his 
 family has been conspicuously identified with war, 
 religion, diplomacy, politics, literature, music, arts 
 and all the other great movements of Prussia and 
 Germany. Prior to coming to Berlin as Foreign 
 Secretary in 1896, Buelow had a unique interna¬ 
 tional experience at Germany’s legations and em¬ 
 bassies at St. Petersburg, Paris, Rome and 
 Bucharest. An aristocrat in bearing, tall, broad- 
 browed and erect, with a ruddy face embellished with 
 a white mustache of military cut, and surmounted 
 by snowy hair punctiliously parted in the middle, 
 Prince Buelow is a soldierly and handsome figure. 
 One is not within the orbit of his charm a second 
 before one realises the presence of a cultured gentle¬ 
 man and sincere host. He must have won many 
 a diplomatic bout with his smile. 
 
 The Kaiser raised Buelow to the dignity of a 
 Prince of Prussia in June, 1905, on the day Germany 
 accomplished the downfall of M. Delcasse from the 
 French Foreign Office. To his gifted Chancellor, 
 William II. gave chief credit for the deepest humilia¬ 
 tion put upon France since Sedan. The Morocco 
 campaign, which had been initiated a few months 
 
 129 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 previous by the Kaiser’s dramatic visit to Tangier, 
 began under Buelow’s regime, but was not essentially 
 of his making. It originated with that unseen 
 autocrat of German diplomacy, the late Baron von 
 Holstein. It may safely be assumed that the Sage 
 of Villa Malta did not covet the laurels Germany 
 eventually reaped in Morocco. 
 
 Buelow never thoroughly understood England 
 and the English character. Anglo-German tension 
 developed during his Chancellorship, though it is 
 fair to remember that he inherited the Foreign 
 Secretaryship after the Kruger telegram. He re¬ 
 jected Mr. Chamberlain’s famous overtures for 
 an Anglo-German-American Alliance, and never 
 particularly exerted himself to bring about a 
 relaxation of the strained relations which still 
 constitute the bogey of the European situation. 
 He was, however, no armaments zealot. On the 
 question of unceasing naval expansion he was 
 dragged along by his more forceful colleague, 
 Admiral von Tirpitz. Buelow recognised the danger 
 of piling up armaments. “They can have but one 
 result,” he declared once in the Reichstag. “Pres¬ 
 sure—counter-pressure—explosion. ’ ’ 
 
 Bernhard the Lucky he remained to the last. 
 Even as a prophet, his very last role in politics, he 
 called the right color. In a parting interview with 
 a Hamburg newspaper, his final public utterance, 
 he warned the Black and Blue alliance which drove 
 him from office that “We shall meet again at 
 Philippi.” He adjured them they had but unloosed 
 
 130 
 
PRINCE VON BUELOW 
 
 the red flood. When the votes were counted at the 
 succeeding general election Social Democracy rose 
 from the impotent half-hundred seats in the 
 Reichstag, to which Buelow had reduced them five 
 years previous, to an imposing no and the stature 
 of the strongest party in Parliament and in the 
 country. 
 
 German traditions and precedents preclude such a 
 possibility, but if Prince Buelow were to be re¬ 
 summoned to the bridge, many would call, not him, 
 but Germany lucky. 
 
XVI 
 
 ADMIRAL VON KOESTER 
 
 I N the early days of March, 1909, a phenomenon 
 unprecedented in the world’s Parliamentary 
 history took place in the Reichstag. German 
 Naval estimates aggregating roundly $100,000,000, 
 the heaviest on record, were passed without a dis¬ 
 senting voice or syllable of debate. Funds for the 
 laying down of three super-Dreadnoughts, a battle¬ 
 cruiser and a complementary squadron of smaller 
 cruisers, torpedo-boats and submarines, and for the 
 fixed charges of naval upkeep, were voted without a 
 murmur of disapproval or discussion. 
 
 It suggests a fascinating psychological study to 
 examine the causes which induce tax-burdened 
 Germany, already saddled with a colossal Army 
 budget, which amounts for 1913 to $500,000,000, 
 to shoulder uncomplainingly naval expenditure, 
 which has risen from $30,000,000 in 1898 to $116,- 
 750,000 in 1913. The explanation is not far 
 to seek. In the amazing propaganda carried on 
 by the German Navy League lies the secret of the 
 conversion of the nation once known as the land of 
 thinkers and poets into a race of naval enthusiasts. 
 It is the Navy League—no mere pusillanimous 
 
 132 
 
ADMIRAL VON KOESTER 
 
 coterie of armchair admirals who adopt resolutions 
 and banquet annually, but a militant phalanx of a 
 million practical patriots—which has driven the 
 doctrine of sea power so deep into the German 
 marrow that it has become a religion. 
 
 Such crusades in all ages have had outstanding 
 generalissimos. Admiral von Koester, the Grand 
 Old Man of the German Fleet, is the personality 
 which has made the Navy League pulsate with life 
 and fruitful energy. A sailor for fifty years, with 
 the highest honours of the service to his credit, he 
 became its president six years ago at a critical 
 juncture. Fanatical methods of a predecessor in 
 office had brought the organisation to the brink of 
 disintegration. The Imperial Admiralty was face 
 to face with a calamity. The break-up of the Navy 
 League threatened danger to the whole future of 
 German naval policy. Koester had just relinquished 
 the commandership-in-chief of the High Seas Fleet 
 with the rank of grand-admiral, which corresponds 
 to the highest rank in the Army, that of a field 
 marshal. Though the privileges and emoluments 
 of the retired list were his due, he much preferred 
 to remain at work. No field of usefulness at the 
 moment compared in importance with the task of 
 keeping intact the machinery of the Navy League. 
 He shouldered it. The executive gifts which had 
 distinguished his entire career speedily enabled 
 him to restore harmony in the League’s warring 
 ranks. On the wave of enthusiasm which accom¬ 
 panied the dawn of the Dreadnought era, the 
 
 I 33 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 Flottcn-Verein was launched on a new career of 
 prosperity and power. 
 
 It was the Kaiser who proclaimed, at the birth 
 of the new century, that “Germany’s future lay 
 upon the water”; that a mighty fleet was “a 
 bitter necessity”; that “the ocean was essential 
 to Germany’s greatness”; that “the trident must 
 be in Michel’s hand”; that “the more Germans 
 who went to sea, the better for the Fatherland,” 
 and the other epigrammatic ukases which fired 
 Teuton imaginations with visions of admiralty. 
 It was Von Tirpitz who piloted ever-recurring pro¬ 
 grammes through the tortuous waters of party 
 politics. But it is the Navy League which has kept 
 the conscience of the country awake, which has 
 aroused the nation’s fears and fanned its passions 
 as occasion demanded. “Record” naval estimates 
 disturb the equanimity of the average German no 
 more than budgets for the State railways. The 
 agitation for naval expansion waged in Germany 
 during the past fifteen years is peerless among 
 campaigns of education in our time. 
 
 To-day the League’s membership is approaching 
 1,250,000. Over 3,500 local branches are scattered 
 throughout the country. No hamlet, no matter 
 how tiny or remote from the seaboard, is left 
 uncanvassed. A pilgrimage to an ancestral shrine 
 once took me to a village deep in the heart of 
 Bavaria, five hundred miles from Kiel. They had 
 never seen a motor-car in sleepy old Binswangen, 
 but they knew all about Dreadnoughts, and before 
 
 I 34 
 
ADMIRAL VON KOESTER 
 
 I quitted his hospitable board, the Chairman of the 
 parish council, who had helped me unravel a genea¬ 
 logical puzzle, invited me to sign an application for 
 membership in the Navy League. 
 
 The League’s invested fortune is nearly $100,000. 
 Its annual income from membership subscriptions 
 is $87,500. It earns another $35,000 from adver¬ 
 tisements in the League’s excellent official organ, 
 Die Flotte —mostly the announcements of the ship¬ 
 builders and gunmakers whose dividends are born 
 in the League’s sleepless propaganda. Close to 
 $125,000 a year is spent in preaching the Big Navy 
 gospel. Die Flotte spreads it broadcast to 360,000 
 Germans at home and abroad from month to month. 
 Glib-tongued orators, whose fervour sometimes 
 triumphs over the truth, drive it home at countless 
 meetings in village, town and city. Twenty cinema- 
 picture apparatuses owned by the League are kept 
 moving across the country, telling in the convincing 
 language of the film the stories and the glories of 
 the Fleet. During the summer holidays thousands 
 of schoolchildren and teachers are brought to the 
 ports, war harbours and dockyards to see the Navy 
 at work and in the making, that each may go home 
 a missionary in the holy cause. Still other excur¬ 
 sions are organised for members of the League as a 
 means of training them to become agitators. The 
 League lays special stress on educating children 
 and people from remote inland regions. The men 
 and women of Hamburg and Bremen, of Danzig 
 and Stettin, in whose nostrils the salt of the sea has 
 
 135 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 lodged since the cradle, need no persuasion. It is 
 the farmers of East and West Prussia, the moun¬ 
 taineers of Bavaria, the mill hands of Rhineland 
 and Westphalia, the peasants of Saxony, the land¬ 
 lubbers of the cities, whom the Navy League 
 systematically lures to the North Sea and the Baltic, 
 and sends back to workaday existences confirmed 
 enthusiasts. They have made privileged inspections 
 of the floating fortresses which belch broadsides 
 calculable only in tons, and believe for evermore 
 in the “bitter need” of might at sea. 
 
 When great political crises like Morocco arise, 
 the Navy League puts on extra coats of war paint. 
 Its hand is seldom disclosed, but its influence is 
 easily recognised. No one at such times can place 
 his finger on the point where the “inspiration” 
 of the League begins and ends, but there is far too 
 much homogeneity and synchronism about the 
 press and pamphlet campaigns which rage at psy¬ 
 chological moments, to entitle them to be considered 
 either spontaneous or sporadic. If public opinion 
 is excited or excitable, as it was after Agadir, the 
 League’s henchmen proceed to excite it still more. 
 The slogan of “The Fatherland in Danger!” is 
 vociferously hoisted to the ramparts. The book¬ 
 shop windows fill up, as if by magic, with inflamma¬ 
 tory prints depicting Germany on the threshold of 
 catastrophe. Brochures clamouring for fresh 
 Dreadnoughts rain on offenceless Members of 
 Parliament. “England, the Foe!” “Perfidious 
 Albion!” “The Coming War!” “The British 
 
 136 
 
ADMIRAL VON KOESTER 
 
 Peril!” “England’s plan to Fall on Us in 19n!” 
 —a random and slender selection of titles from the 
 literature which paved the way for the latest, but 
 probably not the last, great increase in the German 
 Fleet. Nobody subscribes more unreservedly to 
 the doctrine that the end justifies the means than 
 the Deutscher Flottcn-Vercin. 
 
 One of the mildest-eyed and gentlest of men is 
 the presiding genius over this mighty engine of 
 publicity. In his place in the Prussian House of 
 Peers, of which the Kaiser made him a life member 
 in 1905 as an additional mark of recognition of 
 his services to the Empire, Von Koester might be 
 mistaken for the Procurator-General of the Synod. 
 A fine, erect, broad-shouldered figure, he has the 
 geniality of the sea, and when he talks of the 
 German Navy, conciliation, not belligerency, is the 
 Leitmotif. Like every other man in the Kaiser’s 
 Fleet, Von Koester is a profound admirer of British 
 naval traditions, and an advocate of cordial relations 
 with the Mistress of the Sea; but he believes that 
 genuine international friendships rest on mutual 
 esteem. Unprovided with imposing strength at 
 sea, he declares, Germany can never command 
 adequate respect from a naval power. This is 
 the line Von Koester espouses eloquently when 
 he himself plays the role of agitator at important 
 Navy League meetings throughout the country. 
 He particularly combats the theory that Germany 
 has armed in stealth, or gone beyond the limits 
 originally contemplated by her Naval Law. “We 
 
 137 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 have always laid our cards on the table,” is one of 
 his favourite assertions. At present the Navy 
 League’s “programme” is the creation of a flying 
 squadron of battle-cruisers for service in foreign 
 waters, in order that the Kaiser’s flag may be able to 
 assert itself on short notice wherever and when¬ 
 ever German oversea interests are menaced or at¬ 
 tacked. 
 
 If there were real virtue in heredity Admiral von 
 Koester should have been a bard instead of a sailor. 
 He was born at Schwerin in 1844, of a father who 
 was a poet and a mother who was a Schlegel, a 
 kinswoman of the famous scholar who made the 
 standard German translation of Shakespeare. The 
 shores of his native Mecklenburg are washed by 
 the tempestuous Baltic, and something of their 
 virus must have early infected Von Koester, for 
 before he was fifteen he was a cadet in the budding 
 Prussian Navy. At thirty he was a captain and 
 made his first journey around the globe in command 
 of his own brig. In 1891, now a rear-admiral, he 
 began the work which was to earn him the proud 
 title of teacher of the German Fleet. By successive 
 stages of service ashore and afloat, he attained in 
 1903 the commandership-in-chief of the Active Bat¬ 
 tle forces. During the three years of his leadership 
 the Fleet reached the high-water mark of fighting 
 efficiency. It fell to his lot to command it during 
 the principal period of transition from old to new 
 naval ideals. His paths at Kiel was not always 
 strewn with roses, but he proved a diplomat as well 
 
 138 
 
ADMIRAL VON KOESTER 
 
 as a disciplinarian, and when he made way for 
 Prince Henry of Prussia, to become Inspector- 
 General of the Navy, the High Seas Fleet was a 
 radically different organisation than the one he had 
 inherited. 
 
 Von Koester has been compared by his fond pupils 
 among the younger generation of officers to Admiral 
 Jervis, instructor of the British Navy at the close 
 of the eighteenth century, who blazed the way for 
 Nelson and Trafalgar. If Germany’s fate is some 
 day to be decided off the dunes of Heligoland or 
 farther west in the North Sea, the Navy will cherish 
 in grateful recollection the ideals implanted by its 
 teacher, Grand Admiral von Koester. 
 
XVII 
 
 MARSCHALL VON BIEBERSTEIN 
 
 D EVELOPMENT of German sea-power was 
 predestined to make relations with Great 
 Britain the predominant foreign question 
 of William II.’s reign. It was inevitable that sooner 
 or later he should call upon the greatest diplomat 
 in his service to help in its solution. Baron 
 Marschall von Bieberstein was sent to the Court of 
 St. James early in the summer of 1912. Death 
 struck him down almost before he had entered upon 
 what he described as his “steep and stony path.” 
 But his place in history is secure. German para- 
 mountcy in Asia Minor, which will survive the 
 collapse of Turkish power in Europe, is his imperish¬ 
 able monument. Baron von Wangenheim, Baron 
 Marschall’s successor at Constantinople, has just 
 proclaimed that “neither to-day nor in the future 
 will anyone be able to lay a hand on Anatolia, where 
 we have vital interests.” If the day ever comes 
 when the legions of the Kaiser must back up this 
 “Hands Off!” warning with their bayonets, they 
 will leap to action to safeguard the sphere of influ¬ 
 ence secured to Germany primarily by the diplomacy 
 of Marschall von Bieberstein. 
 
 140 
 
MARSCHALL VON BIEBERSTEIN 
 
 A blue-eyed, slightly stooping giant, with 
 intellectual force clearly marked on his scarred 
 face; fearlessness and resource incarnate; a manner 
 which could swerve from irresistible bonhomie to 
 icy reserve; an amazing gift for adaptability to 
 conditions; a German of Germans, who believed 
 to the depth of his being in the righteousness 
 and eventual realisation of his Fatherland's am¬ 
 bitions—such was the Ambassador entrusted in 
 the evening of a long career with the mission 
 of bargaining for peace and friendship with Britain. 
 No one probably more than Marschall himself— 
 so was he popularly known—resented the silly 
 reputation variously imputed to him, that the 
 statesman who inspired the Kruger telegram went 
 to England an Anglophile to the core, deter¬ 
 mined to cement Anglo-German amity at all 
 costs. Baron Marschall’s luggage, when he arrived 
 at Carlton House Terrace, contained parapher¬ 
 nalia much more like an ultimatum than an 
 olive-branch. Not a Government’s last word as 
 customarily spoken, but an ultimatum in this 
 sense—that the dispatch to London of the Kaiser’s 
 most virile diplomatic personality was Germany’s 
 final effort to reconcile her aspirations for more 
 world-dominion with conditions held fundamental 
 for the security of the British Empire. Baron 
 Marschall is understood to have coveted the mission 
 just because of its “steep and stony path.” Before 
 leaving Constantinople he publicly pledged that all 
 his strength would be placed at the disposal of his 
 
 141 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 Emperor in the task he had undertaken. Had he 
 failed to master it, there would have been a dis¬ 
 position in Berlin to banish Anglo-German relations 
 to the realm of the incorrigible. 
 
 Bismarck’s dogma that Ambassadors have but to 
 wheel about in obedience to orders, like a file of 
 Prussian infantrymen at drill, never applied to 
 Baron Marschall. He was sent to England because 
 his chief stock-in-trade was resolute initiative. 
 Marschall was a diplomat who acted, and reported 
 afterwards. 
 
 He was, moreover, essentially what is known in 
 his country as a Realpolitiker. A Realpolitiker is a 
 statesman who, eschewing the chase for the 
 chimerical, concentrates on the pursuit of the 
 practical. When the time came for him to tell 
 Downing Street what it was that Germany “wants,” 
 there would have been little beating about the bush, 
 and a minimum of diplomatic blarney. He was an 
 apostle of brutal directness. At the Hague Con¬ 
 ference he supported stubbornly the German 
 policy of unrestricted armaments on land and sea. 
 The doctrine of territorial expansion as a German 
 imperative claimed his wholehearted loyalty. For 
 fifteen years he devoted himself to the exploitation 
 of that policy; for while German enterprise in 
 Turkey and Asia Minor and her designs on the 
 Persian Gulf may not be officially indexed under 
 the category of aggrandizement, they amount to 
 that. The Bagdad Railway is German for penetra¬ 
 tion pacifique. All the items in the calendar of 
 
 142 
 
MARSCHALL VON BIEBERSTEIN 
 
 Teuton aims and ambitions had a convinced ad¬ 
 herent in the Giant of the Golden Horn. His whole 
 political and diplomatic career was steeped in hos¬ 
 tility to British policy. He fought it in South 
 Africa, he opposed it at The Hague, and he 
 combated it in Turkey. 
 
 Details of circumstance differ, but there is now 
 agreement on the essential fact that Baron Marschall 
 while German Foreign Secretary in 1896 inspired, if 
 he did not actually formulate, the Kruger telegram. 
 It is certain that he was the author of the Circular 
 Note which apprised the Powers that the continuance 
 of Boer independence was “a German interest.” 
 When the Emperor William arrived at the Foreign 
 Office for the first time after the Jameson Raid to 
 counsel with his Chancellor, Prince Hohenlohe; 
 with his Foreign Secretary, Baron Marschall; and 
 with the Secretary of his Navy, Admiral Hollmann, 
 the Kruger dispatch lay ready for the imperial 
 signature. The Kaiser was opposed to the whole 
 idea of burdening the cable with that fateful mes¬ 
 sage. Baron Marschall insisted. He represented that 
 the telegram was demanded, and would be cordially 
 approved, by German public sentiment. The Kaiser 
 yielded, but it was not until after His Majesty had 
 radically “edited” the Foreign Office draft that 
 the telegram was permitted to go on its illstarred 
 way. Baron Marschall remained an ardent member 
 of the group of Continental statesmen who advo¬ 
 cated a coalition to defeat British purposes in South 
 Africa. 
 
 J 43 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 It was not surprising that the Foreign Secretary 
 during whose administration Anglo-German rela¬ 
 tions were at the breaking point should be assigned 
 only a year later to take up the struggle against 
 British supremacy in Turkey. With what telling 
 effect he dedicated himself to the task is a common¬ 
 place of contemporary diplomatic history. Baron 
 Marschall is given somewhat more personal merit 
 for the rise of German power at Constantinople than 
 is actually his due. The foundations of the work he 
 was sent to do were laid deep and well several years 
 before his entrance on the scene. The Kaiser had 
 long since paid personal homage at the Yildiz Kiosk 
 to the “great assassin.” The newly arrived Colossus 
 from Berlin was not the first to bring Abdul Hamid 
 proofs of German friendship and disinterestedness. 
 
 What the Ambassador set himself to do, and did, 
 was to reduce the Sultan to a state of practical sub¬ 
 jugation to German ambitions in Turkey. Wholly 
 unskilled in the arts of professional diplomacy at a 
 foreign capital, it was not many months before 
 Baron Marschall dominated the perspective. His 
 influence was enthroned both at Yildiz Kiosk and at 
 the Sublime Porte. Nobody, Turkish or foreign, 
 could withstand him. He became a sort of unofficial 
 Grand Vizier. German authority throughout 
 Turkey rose as surely and as irresistibly as the sun 
 itself over the placid Bosphorus. By a process of 
 auto-suggestion, people came to regard the German 
 Ambassador as omnipotent and invincible. He 
 exploited his power to the full, and often with a 
 
 144 
 
MARSCHALL VON BIEBERSTEIN 
 
 high hand. A gang of Turkish dock navvies who 
 refused, during the anti-Austrian excitement over 
 Bosnia, to unload a perishable cargo from a German 
 ship, cowered when the captain brought the broad- 
 shouldered representative of Germany to the quay¬ 
 side. A word of command from Marschall sent the 
 mutinous dockers scampering back to their work in 
 the hold like a pack of beaten dogs. 
 
 If Baron Marschall’s career in the last decade of 
 the Hamidian regime was a story of incessant 
 triumph, his record during the four years following 
 the overthrow of the autocracy was still more re¬ 
 markable. It is within the memory of all students of 
 contemporary European events how soothsayers 
 chanted the funeral dirge of German power at 
 Constantinople after the revolution of 1908. But 
 they failed to reckon with the amazing adaptability 
 to new conditions, which was one of Baron 
 Marschall’s marked attributes. He completely re¬ 
 versed the tactics which had raised him to the pin¬ 
 nacle in ante-revolution days. He bided his time. 
 He let Young Turkey come to him. Then he 
 proclaimed that as the Old Turkey was an autocracy, 
 pure and simple, he had necessarily cultivated 
 relations exclusively with the despot; but now that 
 Turkey was become a constitutional monarchy, his 
 services were as freely at its disposal as they had 
 been at the disposal of the discredited regime. No 
 tribute to Baron Marschall’s diplomatic skill could 
 be higher than the mere statement that, despite 
 Abdul Hamid, despite Bosnia and Tripoli, he left 
 
 1.45 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 German influence in Turkey as strong as it was in 
 the heyday of the autocracy. 
 
 Baron Marschall was a native of the South 
 German Grand Duchy of Baden and was sixty-nine 
 years old at the time of his death. After a dozen 
 years of practice as State Prosecutor, he entered 
 politics and was elected to the Reichstag. Always 
 a favorite at the Karlsruhe Court, he was sent to 
 Berlin in the eighties as Baden’s diplomatic repre¬ 
 sentative, with a seat in the Federal Council. Von 
 Holstein, that long-time sinister and all-powerful 
 figure in German politics, was then at the zenith 
 of his power, and Baron Marschall became one of 
 his votaries. The Baden “State’s Attorney,” as 
 Bismarck came contemptuously to call him, aligned 
 himself with the group which successfully plotted 
 for the overthrow of the Iron Chancellor, and when 
 the latter’s son, Count Herbert Bismarck, retired 
 from the Foreign Secretaryship, Herr von Holstein 
 handed over the office to his Baden protege. 
 
 There was much opposition among the profes¬ 
 sional diplomatic clique to the appointment of the 
 untrained “State’s Attorney” to the direction of 
 the Empire’s foreign affairs, and his tenure of 
 Wilhelmstrasse, No. 76, was destined to be a period 
 of stress and storm. It became an era of depart¬ 
 mental scandals, litigation, duels, intrigues and 
 exposures, from which the forceful Foreign Secre¬ 
 tary did not escape unscathed; but his record there 
 on the whole was creditable. The Triple Alliance 
 was renewed during his regime, and Russo-German 
 
 146 
 
MARSCHALL VON BIEBERSTEIN 
 
 co-operation in the Far East, after the Chino- 
 Japanese War, took place under his auspices. His 
 experience as a special pleader at the Bar and his 
 forensic skill proved valuable assets when he had 
 to face the Reichstag in debate. When the implac¬ 
 able Bismarckians finally accomplished his fall from 
 the Foreign Secretaryship in 1897, he was sent to 
 Constantinople. 
 
 A physical giant, Baron Marschall was amiable 
 and gentle of temperament, with an ample supply 
 of reserve force. He was never hail-fellow-well-met, 
 but could be taciturn without becoming austere. 
 He did not make the impression that he was almost 
 a septuagenarian. He spoke English quite fluently, 
 French indifferently. A graduate of Heidelberg, 
 he carried on his left cheek the unfailing sign of 
 university education in Germany, a series of 
 Schmisse inflicted by sabres in student duels. Con¬ 
 siderably over 6 ft. in height and broad in propor¬ 
 tion, Baron Marschall looked every inch the strong 
 man, an impression not lessened by his habit of 
 walking with the suggestion of a stoop. 
 
 His hobbies were chess, music, and gardening. 
 One was surest of finding him in leisure hours at 
 the Teutonia Club in Constantinople manipulating 
 the little wooden men, or playing Beethoven sonatas 
 on his own piano, or perhaps trimming rose bushes 
 under a spreading umbrella in the lovely Embassy 
 gardens overhanging the Bosphorus. 
 
 Baron Marschall’s sudden exit from the Euro¬ 
 pean stage came in time to spare him what would 
 
 147 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 have proved almost a personal humiliation—the 
 break-up of Turkey and her German-trained army 
 before the invincible hosts of the Balkans. 
 Marschall, who had helped to develop it, was a firm 
 believer in Ottoman power. Its ignominious decay 
 would have torn the heartstrings of the once 
 uncrowned autocrat of the Bosphorus. 
 
XVIII 
 
 AUGUST THYSSEN 
 
 I F I rest, I rust.” In these five words are 
 encompassed the philosophy and the policy of 
 August Thyssen, Captain-General of Ger¬ 
 man industry. He has formally adopted them as 
 his watchword. If he affected a coat-of-arms, they 
 would be its slogan. “King Thyssen” is the title 
 his supremacy in the steel, iron and coal trade has 
 won him. “The German Carnegie” is another of 
 his sobriquets. By universal consent he is the domi¬ 
 nating figure of the Fatherland’s throbbing indus¬ 
 trial life. No other man so thoroughly incorporates 
 the aggressiveness and magnitude of the German 
 business age. No one’s life-story so typifies the 
 New Germany’s fabulous rise to power and wealth 
 in the interval since the Franco-Prussian War. 
 
 In the twenty-five years between 1885 and 1910, 
 to select the segment of principal growth, Germany’s 
 production of pig-iron increased from 3,688,000 to 
 14,794,000 tons, an advance of 301 per cent. In 
 the same period production of coal and lignite 
 mounted from 73,675,000 to 222,375,000 tons, an 
 increase of 201 per cent. In the production of 
 iron ore, and of iron and steel, Germany has come 
 far to outstrip Great Britain, which led her by 
 
 149 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 wide margins a quarter of a century ago. These 
 were the totals for 1911:— 
 
 Germany. 
 
 Iron Ore, 29,888,000 tons 
 Pig-Iron, 15,572,000 “ 
 
 Steel, 15,019,000 “ 
 
 England. 
 15.769,000 tons 
 9,875,000 “ 
 
 6,565,000 “ 
 
 German mining production in general—coal, lignite, 
 iron, potash and other salts, zinc, lead and copper— 
 is six and one-half times its volume in 1871. In 
 money it represents an annual value of over $500,- 
 000,000. Barring America, which is far in the 
 van, Germany’s supremacy in steel, iron and coke 
 is unapproached. In Europe her lead is indisputable. 
 She is now behind the United Kingdom only in the 
 production of coal. 
 
 Among those who have directed this Brobdig- 
 nagian development, August Thyssen of Mulheim- 
 on-Ruhr is the towering personality. In the coal 
 and iron trade of Germany he has been what 
 Rockefeller was in oil and Carnegie in steel—the 
 master-builder. The history of all three, who may 
 be bracketed as the commercial geniuses of their 
 age, has been much alike. Each grew from nothing. 
 Thyssen’s career is more comparable to Rockefeller’s 
 than to Carnegie’s. Like the Petroleum King, he 
 is still at work. He has not gone in for peace, 
 libraries and philanthropy like the American 
 Thyssen, but, a hardy septuagenarian, still derives 
 his joy in life from mining coal, puddling iron and 
 rolling steel. He intends to die in harness. The 
 emblem on Bismarck’s escutcheon —Patriae inser- 
 
 150 
 
AUGUST THYSSEN 
 
 viendo consumor —would fit Thyssen precisely, if 
 rendered to read that he is consuming himself in the 
 cause of labour, instead of country. He is a restless 
 workman. He has been known to tire out three 
 secretaries in one day. Much of his time is spent 
 travelling about the country on his own business. 
 His home, a feudal castle, is really a branch office 
 of his firm. Adjoining his bedroom is a workroom. 
 He believes that neither men nor iron should grow 
 rusty. 
 
 The pioneer of Americanism in German industry, 
 Thyssen’s career has been typically transatlantic in 
 its origin and development. The Standard Oil 
 Company was the outgrowth of an original in¬ 
 vestment of $72,500 by the firm of Rockefeller & 
 Andrews. August Thyssen inaugurated his career 
 about the same time, in the early sixties, with a 
 capital of $6,000, with which he built a rolling-mill 
 employing sixty workmen. To-day he employs 50,- 
 000. His largest property, the Deutscher Kaiser 
 Colliery at Hamborn, has a pay-roll of 26,000 and 
 mines over 5,000,000 tons of coal a year His 
 fortune is variously estimated at $50,000,000 and 
 $100,000,000. It is probably more than the former 
 and less than the latter. His interests long ago 
 outgrew merely local dimensions. To-day, in ad¬ 
 dition to vast coal-mines, blast-furnaces, rolling- 
 mills, by-product factories, salt and potash mines, 
 harbours and docks at Hamborn, Duisburg, Mul- 
 heim and other points along and contiguous to the 
 Rhine and the Ruhr, Thyssen’s influence extends 
 
 151 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 around the globe. From Caen, in Normandy, he im¬ 
 ports iron ore taken from his own mines, and from 
 Montigny half-finished products founded and cast in 
 his own mills. They are loaded into his own steam¬ 
 ers from his own docks—a genuine German base on 
 French soil. At Nikolaieff, on the Russian coast 
 of the Black Sea, he has warehouses and docks for 
 the storage and shipment of ore for his devouring 
 furnaces on the far-off Rhine. In Brazil and India, 
 the German flag flies over Thyssen wharves and 
 harbours. His dominating ideal is to insure German 
 industry in general, and his own properties in 
 particular, sources of raw material supply which 
 will render them for ever independent of foreign 
 influence. It is a little-known fact that August 
 Thyssen was the father of the idea which eventuated 
 in Germany’s ill-starred Moroccan venture. Several 
 years ago he planned to make Sultan Abdul-Aziz 
 a loan in exchange for a monopoly of Morocco’s 
 incalculably rich iron-ore deposits. The German 
 Government frowned upon the enterprise, only 
 later to threaten Europe with war in defence of 
 mining rights meantime secured by another group 
 of Rhenish industrialists, the Brothers Mannesmann 
 of Diisseldorf and Remscheid. 
 
 From America Thyssen borrowed the idea of 
 concentrating capital and amalgamating allied in¬ 
 dustries. He founded the Rhenish-Westphalian 
 Steel Syndicate, the Rhenish-Westphalian Coal 
 Syndicate, the Pig-Iron Syndicate, and practically 
 all the important “Cartels” now existing in Ger- 
 
 !5 2 
 
AUGUST THYSSEN 
 
 many for the control of output and regulation of 
 prices in the industries allied to the steel, iron and 
 coal trades. He is a firm disciple of the despised 
 Trust idea as an effective means of preventing crises 
 caused by over-production or price cutting competi¬ 
 tions. For his own purposes he improved on the 
 Transatlantic pattern by forming a Trust in which 
 a single person should be board of directors, execu¬ 
 tive committee and shareholders all rolled into an 
 autocratic one. The Standard Oil Company, the 
 United States Steel Corporation and other octopuses 
 dispose over assets which reduce Thyssen’s proper¬ 
 ties to comparative insignificance, but their stock¬ 
 holders’ meetings are not nearly so harmonious as 
 his. The Thyssen Trust belongs to Thyssen. He is 
 monarch of all he surveys. A brother and an eldest 
 son are nominal partners, but the King of Miilheim 
 wields a sway no American Trust magnate ever en¬ 
 joyed. He is the only German industrialist who has 
 no entangling alliances with Banks. “Interlocking 
 directorates,” which the United States Government 
 is fighting, are a recognized and integral feature of 
 German financial organisation. On the boards of 
 all great industrial corporations sit representatives 
 of the banks, usually with all-powerful voices and 
 votes. Representatives of the Dresdner Bank, 
 Germany’s second largest concern, are on the 
 Boards of two hundred companies with an aggre¬ 
 gate capital of $650,000,000. No bank has control¬ 
 ling fingers in King Thyssen’s pies. He has no 
 shares to list on the Berlin Bourse. Speculation 
 
 153 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 is never carried on in his name. He brags that 
 he does not understand the A. B. C. of the Stock 
 Exchange. 
 
 Thyssen’s declared income for tax purposes is a 
 paltry $750,000. The actual revenue derived from 
 his enormous interests is admittedly in excess of 
 that figure, but as his policy is immediately to re¬ 
 invest profits in extension of plant, the bulk of them 
 is not subject to income taxation. From his hum¬ 
 blest days he has adhered to the principle of inces¬ 
 sant expansion. Every thousand marks he has 
 earned has gone back into the business. He cares 
 nothing for money as a mere possession. Its only 
 attraction to him is as an instrument for acquisition 
 of fresh power. His consuming ideal is a steel, iron 
 and coal autocracy subject to one indisputable will. 
 Such an industrial empire this Rhenish Caesar has 
 built, and he remains its absolutist ruler. He mines 
 his own ore, owns and navigates the ships which 
 transport it, built the docks and harbours where they 
 unload it, and himself digs the coal for the furnaces, 
 mills and foundries which are to turn out coke, 
 sheet-steel, armour-plate, ingots, billets, tubing, rails, 
 ammonia, tar and the other dozen by-products of 
 his trade. Uppermost always in Thyssen’s mind 
 is the reduction of the cost of production. That, 
 he says, is the beacon-light on which industrial 
 energy must rivet its gaze. Devotion to that prin¬ 
 ciple has as much to do with the development of 
 German industry as any other single thing. It 
 accounts for the fact that German works are full 
 
 154 
 
AUGUST THYSSEN 
 
 of technical experts. For every ten artisans in a 
 mill or factory there will be at least one technical 
 man or engineer. Avoidance of waste is their 
 great speciality. They will devote years to evolving 
 processes for cheapening production or creating 
 by-products. In the Chicago stockyards, as all the 
 world knows, the pork-packers utilize all of a pig 
 except the squeal. Down August Thyssen’s way 
 they make use of everything except the smoke. And 
 even now he has Charlottenburg graduates at work 
 on a process of converting that into a marketable 
 commodity. 
 
 The German Government paid an extraordinary 
 tribute to Thyssen two or three years ago by 
 inviting him to overhaul the business end of the 
 Admiralty at Berlin. Dockyard scandals at Kiel 
 had revealed a woeful lack of purely commercial 
 acumen in the department otherwise so ably ad¬ 
 ministered by Admiral von Tirpitz. Conscience¬ 
 less tradesmen were pulling the wool over the Navy’s 
 eyes in lamentable and costly fashion. A master 
 of buying and selling was needed to lick things into 
 shape. The Admiralty did the natural thing and 
 invoked the aid of the greatest merchant-mind in 
 the country, August Thyssen, to put the Navy on a 
 business basis. Recently, it came to light that 
 the Vulcan Shipbuilding Company of Stettin and 
 Hamburg, the biggest in Germany, delivered Dread¬ 
 noughts to the Admiralty in 1912 at a loss of 
 $500,000. The company had to wipe out its entire 
 building reserve to cover the deficit. Things have 
 
 155 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 changed since the days when the rag-merchants of 
 Kiel could bamboozle the Navy. It is King Thyssen 
 who taught Tirpitz how to drive a bargain. 
 
 Like Mr. Chamberlain, Thyssen thinks inter¬ 
 national politics in this day and age are business 
 politics, pure and simple. He attributes the strain 
 in Anglo-German relations to British envy of Ger¬ 
 man competition—a myopic theory widely held in 
 the Fatherland. He believes diplomacy ought to be 
 taken out of the hands of courtiers and transferred 
 to engineers, merchants and manufacturers. Trade 
 relations are so internationally interwoven, Thyssen 
 declares, that political relations ought to be adjusted 
 on the basis of reciprocal interests. Approached 
 from that standpoint he thinks England and Ger¬ 
 many could soon discover the groundwork of an 
 entente cordiale. He favours international treaties 
 for regulating prices of world commodities like 
 coal, and is persuaded they would do more to cement 
 friendships than defensive and offensive alliances 
 dependent on battleships and army corps. 
 
 Thyssen is seventy-one years old. Passion for 
 work, rugged independence, almost sullen silence, 
 and democratic simplicity are August Thyssen’s 
 outstanding qualities. He cares nothing for titles, 
 society, or external honours of any kind. He is a 
 Roman Catholic who says he is old fashioned 
 enough to be religious. His hobby is the welfare 
 of his workmen, for which he provides liberally. 
 He wears three-guinea suits. He apologizes for an 
 incorrigible inability to over-estimate his fellow-men, 
 
 x 5 6 
 
AUGUST THYSSEN 
 
 Only one of three sons has inherited the sturdy 
 traits of their father, Fritz, the eldest. 
 
 The one outward trapping of great wealth about 
 August Thyssen is his home, the beautiful Castle 
 Landsberg, a glorious old Gothic Schloss high up 
 on the wooded ramparts of the Ruhr, near Diissel- 
 dorf. He acquired it in 1903 and like everything 
 else he ever owned has “extended the plant’’ by 
 reconstruction. Castle Landsberg, rich in moss and 
 memories of the Middle Ages, is a fitting abode 
 for a king. To-day it shelters a monarch whose 
 proudest boast is that he is a workingman, who 
 intends to keep on labouring as long as there is 
 life within him. 
 
XIX 
 
 MAX LIEBERMANN 
 
 I T is small wonder that Germany’s most eminent 
 living painter, Max Liebermann, should be a 
 revolutionary. He came into the world in 
 1849, while his own native Berlin was still rever¬ 
 berating to the echo of the cannonade which com¬ 
 pelled Frederick William IV. to grant rebellious 
 Prussia a constitution. The spirit of sedition 
 imbibed with his mother’s milk has remained with 
 Liebermann through life. After the wave of revolt 
 which had long since engulfed the French Art 
 School lapped over into South Germany and sub¬ 
 merged Munich, then, as now, the hub of the Father¬ 
 land’s painting universe, Max Liebermann carried 
 the crusade into North Germany and founded the 
 Berlin “Secession.” That was fourteen years ago. 
 Time, the incorrigible chastener, has sobered the 
 tempestuous ideals of 1899, but Liebermann still 
 wears the title of Anarchist, bestowed upon his 
 school from Imperial quarters as a stigma of honour. 
 Art in official Germany, like the Army, is largely 
 
 158 
 

MAX LIEBERMANN 
 
 ordered from on high. Liebermann is uncompromis¬ 
 ingly at war with the goose-step regime. It despises 
 him with a cordiality no less profound. Never was 
 there antipathy more mutual or more whole¬ 
 heartedly reciprocated. 
 
 Ask Liebermann the state of the score between 
 him and the Kaiser, and he will lead you to the 
 windows of his house abutting Brandenburg Gate, 
 Berlin’s Arc de Triomphe, and point to the snow- 
 white marble counterfeits of the Emperor and 
 Empress Frederick glittering at the entrance to the 
 sylvan Tiergarten across the way. If you have 
 artistic tears to shed, Liebermann will bid you 
 prepare to shed them now; and then he will assure 
 you that the Kaiser, by planting such “art” where it 
 must offend a painter’s gaze every time he seeks 
 sun, light and air, which are Liebermann’s Gods, 
 has wreaked revenge for the sins of Secessionists 
 for all time. “All I can do,” says Liebermann, 
 “is to wear blue goggles; but it is a life-sen¬ 
 tence.” 
 
 An arrival in Berlin in the benighted first years of 
 the new century was taught to regard the Secession, 
 then in the heyday of militant leadership under 
 Liebermann, as something hardly mentionable in 
 polite artistic society. One went to the annual 
 exhibition in Kurfurstendamm as to a Museum of 
 Misapplied Arts, and talked of Secessionists in 
 terms nowadays reserved for Cubists, Futurists 
 and Post-Impressionists. Of the Liebermannites 
 of 1901 and 1902 people sang as the music-hall 
 
 159 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 comedians of New York satirised the “new art” 
 recently exhibited there: 
 
 I beheld a pile of brickbats underneath a cellar stair, 
 
 Which was labelled “Spanish dancer with the limelight on 
 her hair.” 
 
 I remarked a slab of limestone on a dingy rubbish heap, 
 And was told it was the portrait of “An Indian child 
 asleep.” 
 
 Seven lengths of cedar scantlings were “My Lady’s Easter 
 hat.” 
 
 I don’t hanker for the future if it’s going to be like that. 
 
 As far as Liebermann was concerned, the future 
 of the Secession was not to be “like that.” With 
 Leistikow, Ury, Slevogt, Corinth and the other 
 toreadors who rallied round his standard in the early 
 days, he was doomed to be excoriated as conservative 
 to the point of reaction by the rising generation of 
 hotspurs. To-day Liebermann is looked upon as 
 old-fogeyish by “Secessionists,” because he refuses 
 to identify himself with their extravagances. He 
 found the movement getting out of hand several 
 years ago, and laid down the presidency of the 
 Berlin Secession. Since then he has been merely its 
 decorative Honorary President. But he has lived 
 to see his ideals become the ruling force instead of 
 the seditious intruder clamouring vainly for a 
 hearing. 
 
 His own artistic reputation is second to none 
 among German artists of the era. For twenty years 
 a senator of the Academy, his Alma Mater, the 
 University of Berlin, has conferred on him the title 
 of Professor and the Honorary Doctor’s degree. 
 
 160 
 
MAX LIEBERMANN 
 
 He is a member of the Societe Nationale des Beaux- 
 Arts, of the Societe Royale Beige des Aquarellistes, 
 and of the Cercle des Aquarellistes at The Hague. 
 Specimens of his works adorn the walls of the 
 Luxembourg Museum in Paris, the Royal Picture 
 Gallery in Dresden, the Pinakothek of Munich, the 
 National Gallery and Kaiser Friedrich Museum in 
 Berlin, and the Municipal Art Museums of Ham¬ 
 burg, Bremen, Frankfort and half a dozen other 
 German cities. Hardly a private collection of note 
 in Germany is without its Liebermann. His etch¬ 
 ings are to be found in the leading print cabinets of 
 the Continent. The foremost apostle of the school 
 once stigmatised in exalted quarters as “gutter art” 
 is content to rest on the laurels already his. He 
 cherishes no ambition to hang between the serried 
 apotheoses of Mars which make the galleries of 
 Prussian royal castles look like museums of war. 
 A partisan of plain-speaking and realistic expres¬ 
 sion—by preference in his own unlovely Berlin 
 dialect—he will tell you that the Kaiser considers 
 a Liebermann picture akin to an emetic. Lieber¬ 
 mann returns the compliment by ranking His 
 Majesty’s taste with the passion of Louis XIV. 
 for the purely massive and decorative as the quin¬ 
 tessence of greatness in art. Some of the Kaiser’s 
 sons, charmed with a Liebermann painting, once 
 had the temerity to vent their enthusiasm in the 
 parental presence. They were not encouraged to 
 repeat the experiment. 
 
 Liebermann was the ideal man to inject a true 
 161 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 spirit of innovation into German art, because of his 
 uniquely cosmopolitan training. Though French 
 realism is his pronounced note, the modern Dutch 
 and Flemish Schools were of hardly less influence 
 on him. Manet and Degas are apparently his 
 Buddhas, especially the former, to judge from the 
 works with which the walls of Liebermann’s home 
 are crowded. Liebermann’s first great canvas, 
 “Women Plucking Geese,” now a prized gem of 
 the Berlin National Gallery, was produced in 1872. 
 It depicts homely toil with such dismal faithfulness 
 that it has earned the artist the epithet of “Apostle 
 of Ugliness.” The great Menzel thought differently 
 about it. He sent for Liebermann and said: “So 
 you are the perpetrator of that picture? Well, 
 you know, you ought to have your ears boxed with 
 it. It’s excellent. But a man doesn’t paint that 
 sort of thing until he’s fifty.” Liebermann was not 
 yet twenty-five when he set all Germany talking 
 about “Women Plucking Geese.” Its relentless 
 simplicity was a striking departure from the 
 academic conventionalities then prevailing, but 
 Liebermann’s emancipation from the dinginess 
 which had hitherto characterised his colour schemes 
 did not take place until his association with Millet, 
 the idealiser of labor, in the summer of 1873. At 
 Barbizon, alongside Millet, Liebermann studied 
 Corot, Troyon and Daubigny, and, overcoming the 
 spell of Munkacsy, under which he had produced 
 earlier pictures in Paris, brightened his palette 
 correspondingly. 
 
 162 
 
MAX LIEBERMANN 
 
 The compelling power of his subsequent special¬ 
 isation in labor themes was to make Liebermann 
 known as the German Millet. He was the first 
 of German painters to find the dignity of work 
 worthy of the artist’s brush. Labourers in the 
 fields and factories, cobblers, weavers, spinners 
 and lace-makers merited his attention and inspired 
 some of his most striking work. He never strove 
 to force a story into them. The note of romance 
 was almost always lacking. His ambition was to 
 portray workaday folk as they are, absorbed in 
 toil and not as if posing before a camera. “The 
 Cobbler’s Shop,” in the Berlin National Gallery, 
 is a brilliant specimen, and is one of the productions 
 in which Liebermann’s talents as a wizard of light 
 effects are exemplified. When the picture was first 
 exhibited in Paris, the French critic, M. Hochede, 
 addressing Liebermann’s friend and co-worker, 
 Manet, made it famous with these words: “If 
 you have discovered the secrets of plein air, my 
 dear Manet, Max Liebermann has learned how 
 to catch light within a room. I would gladly 
 give up 500 square metres of all the paintings 
 in the Salon for the possession of ‘The Cobbler’s 
 Shop.’ ” 
 
 Rembrandt and Franz Hals had long lured 
 Liebermann periodically to Llolland, but nothing 
 was of such paramount personal influence on him 
 as his acquaintance and friendship with Jozef 
 Israels, the Nestor of the modern Dutch School, on 
 whom Liebermann has written a masterly mono- 
 
 163 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 graph. It was particularly the atmospheric environ¬ 
 ment of the Netherlands which incited the young 
 German painter to revel in the myriad effects of 
 intermingling sunlight, mist and haze which give 
 Dutch landscapes a tinge all their own. “The Dunes 
 of Noordwyk,” a favorite haunt of Liebermann, 
 and a score of other pictures of Dutch land, sea, 
 streets, fields and buildings, tell of the profound 
 impression made by Liebermann’s many wander¬ 
 ings in the Netherlands. It was the inspiration of 
 Israels’ immortaliser of the aged, which generated 
 Liebermann’s fondness for painting old people. 
 His “Old Men’s Home in Amsterdam” won him 
 the Gold Medal of the Paris Salon in 1881, and was 
 the first distinction conferred on a German artist 
 since the Franco-Prussian War. Another Dutch 
 picture which fortified Liebermann’s fame in 
 France, “Courtyard of the Orphanage in Amster¬ 
 dam,” was a triumph of light reproduction. An 
 admiring Parisian critic, who saw it at the Salon of 
 1882, declared that Liebermann had stolen some of 
 the rays from the sun and utilised them as if he 
 were Phoebus himself. That distinguished English 
 critic, Mr. P. G. Konody, writing of how Lieber¬ 
 mann’s fame “had to be echoed back from France, 
 Belgium and Holland before reluctant compatriots 
 awarded him the eminent position which is his due 
 in the history of German art,” says that the secret 
 of Liebermann’s art is that his pictures “hold the 
 fragrance of the soil and the breezes of the heavens. 
 His people move in their proper atmosphere, and 
 
 164 
 
MAX LIEBERMANN 
 
 their life is stated in all its monotonous simplicity, 
 without artificial pathos or melodramatic exaggera¬ 
 tion.” 
 
 To-day Liebermann devotes most of his energies 
 to portrait-paintings. They reveal distinct traces 
 of the Franz Hals influence. Many of the contem¬ 
 porary great of Germany have sat for him—Prince 
 Bulow, Gerhart Hauptmann, Professor Koch, 
 Prince Lichnowsky, Emil Rathenau, Paul Ehrlich 
 and Dr. Bode, to mention a few of the best known. 
 Liebermann’s portraits live up to his cardinal 
 artistic ideal—photographic reality minus retouch¬ 
 ing. His famous “Burgomaster Dr. Burchard, of 
 Hamburg,” by which he is represented at the 
 Kaiser-Jubilee Exhibition of Modern German Art 
 now being held at the Royal Academy in Berlin, 
 was so startlingly faithful that the burgomaster’s 
 family first refused to allow it to be exhibited. 
 Burchard sat for Liebermann in 1911. “I saw the 
 death pallor in his face, and I painted it,” says the 
 artist. Burchard died in 1912. 
 
 “Art is the only true religion,” opines this great 
 Secessionist, who will not admit that he is an 
 atheist. God to him does not mean dogma. Art 
 is his creed, because the only religion he considers 
 worth while is an expression of something within 
 you that you can prove. He is almost savagely 
 jealous of his Judaism. “Nothing in the world— 
 absolutely nothing,” he avers, “will ever persuade 
 me to renounce the nativity of my fathers.” He 
 calls himself an aboriginal Berliner because there 
 
 165 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 are a half-dozen or more generations of Berliners 
 behind him, and, when he looks on his own portraits 
 of himself, has no compunction in claiming that the 
 blood of royalty must course in his veins. He insists 
 that no such strongly accentuated physiognomy as 
 his—high-arched eyebrows, a hawk-like nose, a 
 bull-dog jaw—could be aught but the badge of 
 descent from a race of Babylonian, Assyrian and 
 Phoenician kings. 
 
 When you ask Liebermann about the future of 
 Art, he tells you that it rests in the hands of artists, 
 and not of Providence. “God fights on the side 
 of the biggest talents,” is one of his pithy epigrams. 
 His dachshund, “Manne,” plays a great role in 
 the painter’s daily life. Like Schopenhauer, he 
 says he would not care to live if there were no dogs. 
 “They are the best companions,” he explains. 
 “They neither talk back nor contradict. Can as 
 much be said of a woman?” He says the raison 
 d’etre of Secessionism was a bread-and-butter desire 
 to materialise idealism. “Nowadays,” he adds, 
 “the order of things is reversed. The world 
 idealises materialism.” Liebermann cares nothing 
 for music or drama. He will only hear Mozart 
 operas. Though a modern of moderns himself, he 
 regards Wagner “Germany’s crowning misfortune,” 
 complains that he cannot fathom Richard Strauss, 
 and foresees the eventual return of wayward 
 twentieth-century musical ideals to Mozart. Lieber¬ 
 mann invented a new tax in Germany, the 
 classic land of imposts—a tariff on autographs. 
 
 166 
 
MAX LIEBERMANN 
 
 Admirers who covet his signature receive the fol¬ 
 lowing printed notice: 
 
 Autograph Tax 
 
 Herr Liebermann does not derive any 
 more satisfaction from sending autographs 
 or packing up autograph-albums. Any¬ 
 body who wants his signature must first 
 furnish evidence that he has given at 
 least twenty marks to charity. 
 
 It was well that Max Liebermann revolted even 
 against his parents and went in for painting surrep¬ 
 titiously. Had they had their way he might to-day 
 have been nothing but a great business man; but 
 the world of beauty would have been incalculably 
 the poorer. Liebermann cherishes his parents in 
 pious reverence. The luxurious home in which he 
 lives is that in which they raised him, and the only 
 specimen of his own craftsmanship on the whole 
 artistic premises is the life-size portrait of his 
 mother and father. 
 
XX 
 
 DERNBURG 
 
 S EVEN years ago this coming autumn, the 
 Kaiser tried a bold experiment. He made 
 a Cabinet Minister out of a business man 
 who had nothing to recommend him but sheer 
 ability. Though Germany is the vaunted land of 
 efficiency, the experiment failed. Bernhard Dern- 
 burg, commoner-banker of Jewish origin, summoned 
 to clean the Augean stables of muddled German 
 colonial administration in September, 1906, was 
 already in June, 1910, a thing of the political past. 
 His career had lasted less than four years. There 
 was no place for mere capacity in a Government 
 saturated with bureaucracy, and Dernburg had to 
 go. Hailed at home and abroad as the German 
 Joseph Chamberlain, because of his singular resem¬ 
 blance to the greatest of colonial secretaries in 
 antecedents and methods, Herr Dernburg committed 
 the revolutionary and fatal blunder of applying 
 business ethics to the conduct of Germany’s colonies. 
 His ultimate downfall was as inevitable as the 
 grave. He was not the first to strike his colours 
 to the system into which he had been so uncon¬ 
 ventionally pitchforked, and he will not be the last. 
 
 168 
 
DERNBURG 
 
 Germany’s oversea possessions, embracing in 
 square miles an area very many times that of the 
 Empire in Europe, were irreverently and variously 
 known prior to the Dernburg era, as sand-wastes 
 and graveyards for subsidies. Hardly any Germans, 
 except officials and soldiers, ever went to them. 
 Togoland, Kamerun, German South-West and East 
 Africa, Kiau-Chau and the dependencies in the 
 far Pacific, in and about the Samoan Islands, 
 figured relentlessly on the wrong side of the Imperial 
 ledger. The Fatherland’s cup of colonial misery 
 finally overflowed when to the ordinary burdens 
 of Empire were added the heavy sacrifices in 
 blood and treasure of a stubborn rebellion in South- 
 West Africa. The able gentlemen of the green- 
 table system found, less to their indignation than to 
 their astonishment, that bureaucracy and colonising 
 do not go hand in hand. Half a dozen Gelieimrate 
 and Herren Doktorcn had been tried at the Colonial 
 Office. All had failed. The last to be found want¬ 
 ing was a kinsman of the Kaiser himself, Prince 
 Ernst von Hohenlohe-Langenburg. Dernburg was 
 relied upon to do for the colonies what he had made 
 a reputation for doing as a rejuvenator of industrial 
 and financial lame-ducks—to put them on their feet. 
 
 Patriotism of a high order induced Dernburg to 
 desert business for office. He gave up the manag¬ 
 ing-directorship of a great bank worth $50,000 a 
 year, and a dozen company directorships netting him 
 half as much again, for a paltry Cabinet salary of 
 $6,250 and a glorious opportunity to fail. But the 
 
 169 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 Kaiser was looking for a specialist in obstacle- 
 smashing, and when Dernburg’s record as a financial 
 life saver was laid before him, William II. declared 
 he had found the man. The dramatic appointment 
 of the self-made young son of the people, whose 
 father was a working journalist on the staff of a 
 Berlin newspaper, speedily followed. His presence 
 on the Government bench in Parliament infused 
 new life into that galaxy of bureaucratic efficiency. 
 Before he had been in office three months his ag¬ 
 gressive personality was all-pervading. In the pas¬ 
 sionate Reichstag electoral crisis which he himself 
 provoked, he was the dominating figure. The 
 campaign was fought singly on the issue Dernburg 
 raised—the preservation and development of the 
 colonies. Taking the hustings as chief spokesman 
 for the Government, he toured the country, north 
 and south, east and west, preaching everywhere in 
 glowing terms the gospel of Germany’s future 
 oversea. He developed remarkable powers as a 
 campaigner and political fighter. Over night he 
 became the strong man of Prince Billow’s Govern¬ 
 ment, achieving within four months of his entrance 
 upon official life renown and meteoric popularity. 
 When the votes were counted, the unholy alliance 
 of clericalism and socialism, which had defied Dern¬ 
 burg’s Colonial Estimates and precipitated the 
 general election, found itself shorn of power. 
 
 Dernburg’s name now meant energy, daring and 
 success. The wise men and grey beards of the ante¬ 
 diluvian System mopped their spectacles, aghast. 
 
 170 
 
DERNBURG 
 
 His enemies became numerous and industrious. 
 They declared he could not, and would not, last. 
 The aristocratic caste, which monopolises high 
 office in Germany by inherited tradition, regardless 
 of merit, bitterly resented the all-conquering prog¬ 
 ress of a commoner of Semitic ancestry. They 
 called him unmannered. They chided him for his 
 awkwardness in Court dress. They said his whole 
 bearing in his new surroundings was manifestly 
 insufferable. But he went on doing things at the 
 cobwebbed Colonial Office. 
 
 Anybody familiar with Dernburg’s banking career 
 could have told the gilded popinjays, whose sus¬ 
 ceptibilities he so grievously offended, that his 
 distinguishing characteristic is Riicksichtslosigkcit 
 —cold-blooded, unrelenting disregard of anything 
 but his objective. Prof. Bergmann, Germany’s 
 great surgeon, asked once by a wounded soldier in 
 a field hospital what could be done for him, replied: 
 “Decapitation.” Decapitation had been Dernburg’s 
 guiding principle when some desperate financial 
 project was brought to his operating room at the 
 Darmstadter Bank. He tackled the moribund 
 German colonies in the same spirit. Deceased 
 organs, administrative scandals, red tape, old 
 fogeyism and incompetence were lopped off merci¬ 
 lessly by this political surgeon, who cared nothing 
 for rank and title, and developed an annoying 
 habit of insisting on proved merit as the price of 
 connection with the colonial service. Shirt-sleeves 
 administration, as Americans call it, was the regime 
 
 i ? 1 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 installed by the fearless innovator who learned to 
 “hustle” in the frenzied din of Wall Street. 
 
 Dernburg is in his fiftieth year. Stocky of build, 
 square-shouldered, with a grizzly brown beard 
 framing a set of heavy jaws, determination and 
 force are writ large across his physiognomy which 
 bears distinct traces of Hebraic extraction. He is 
 descended from a long line of Hessian-Rhenish 
 ancestors, so famed for intellectual attainments as 
 scholars, rabbis, lawyers and writers, that bright 
 men in the region were described as having 
 “Dernburg heads.” As a lad of nineteen, Dernburg 
 was sent to study banking methods in New York, 
 where he served a three-years’ apprenticeship. 
 Returning to Berlin as a clerk in the Deutsche Bank, 
 young Dernburg speedily revealed the organising 
 ability which was, at forty-two, to call him into the 
 councils of the Empire. 
 
 About this time the Deutsche Bank founded the 
 first trust company in Germany for the purpose of 
 salving wrecked financial and industrial concerns. 
 Herr Dernburg was made managing director. He 
 had conducted its affairs only a few months when 
 he attracted national attention by skilful resuscita¬ 
 tion of some practically defunct mortgage-banks 
 which wiseacres had abandoned as hopeless cases. 
 The economic crisis of 1900, which drove the Leip- 
 ziger Bank and other staunch German commer¬ 
 cial craft into dry dock to repair leaks, gave Dern¬ 
 burg his great opportunity. He was summoned to 
 the chief directorship of the Bank fur Handel und 
 
 172 
 
DERNBURG 
 
 Industrie better known as the Darmstadter Bank, 
 where he enjoyed full scope for the exercise of his 
 daring strokes of financial genius. They were 
 admittedly harsh, revolutionary and staggering in 
 their audacity, but almost always effective. Herr 
 Dernburg was in the midst of his banking career, 
 when asked to bring his sledge hammer and axe to 
 the Colonial Office. He responded to the call on the 
 express condition that he should be permitted to 
 continue swinging them in his new field of use¬ 
 fulness. 
 
 He did not forthwith convert the colonies into 
 El Dorados. They continued to reveal an insatiable 
 appetite for subsidies, but they ceased to be mere 
 playgrounds for civilian and military martinets, 
 and began to attract the attention of genuine 
 colonisers—bankers, shippers, merchants, farmers 
 and traders. “Colonial fatigue,” an old-time 
 German malady, grew less. The sand-wastes of 
 Africa and the Pacific were no longer looked upon 
 merely as so many millstones around the Imperial 
 neck. Having brought a semblance of order out of 
 chaos at the Colonial Office itself, Dernburg gave 
 Wilhelmstrasse traditions another jolt by going to 
 Africa in his first year of office to study the colonies 
 on the spot. Predecessors had been content to know 
 about them from perfunctory reports of military 
 and civil governors. While fellow Ministers were 
 holiday-making at the seashore or in the mountains, 
 Dernburg was trekking in ducks and helmet across 
 the sun-baked veldt of East and South-West Africa, 
 
 173 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 making the face-to-face acquaintance of sub¬ 
 ordinate administrators, studying the ravages of 
 the Herero rebellion and learning by personal 
 observation exactly what was needed to improve 
 the lot of each particular community. He scan¬ 
 dalised bureaucratic functionaries at home by pro¬ 
 claiming the heretical doctrine that Africa was a 
 black man’s country, and that natives had to be 
 treated from some other than the Berlin barrack- 
 yard point of view. He returned to Germany 
 to give his countrymen an entirely new conception 
 of their mission and opportunities as a colonial 
 power. In 1908, still insatiable for firsthand knowl¬ 
 edge, Dernburg went to Africa again, this time 
 extending his travels to the Transvaal, Cape Colony, 
 Natal and Rhodesia, to study British colonial 
 practices at work. Shortly after his second trip 
 across the equator, Dernburg established the budding 
 diamond industry in German South-West Africa on 
 an admirable basis. Intent, above all else, on de¬ 
 veloping the economic importance of the colonies, 
 Dernburg chose as his next field of exploration the 
 United States, where he spent eight busy weeks 
 investigating the cotton belt, with a view to apply¬ 
 ing American plantation methods to cotton culture 
 in Togoland and East Africa. 
 
 During all these strenuous months of loyal and 
 effective service, Dernburg’s foes were remorselessly 
 at work. The Roman Catholic Centre party, which 
 he had humbled at the very outset of his career, had 
 long coveted his scalp. Through the years they had 
 
 U4 
 
DERNBURG 
 
 gathered many an ally outside their own ranks, 
 for Dernburg the Ruthless had the gentle art of 
 making enemies. Prince Billow, under whom the 
 Colonial Secretary had taken office and enjoyed 
 much latitude, was no longer Chancellor. Cleri¬ 
 calism had again become the power behind the 
 Governmental throne. Dernburg’s head was one 
 of its first demands. Since the summer of 1910 
 he has been what a distinguished United States 
 Senator once described himself to be—a states¬ 
 man out of a job. Report periodically associates 
 Dernburg’s name with the managing-directorship 
 of some great commerical or financial organisation. 
 If he hankers to return to his first love, business, he 
 has apparently not yet found anything quite to his 
 liking. 
 
 A year ago he was suggested for the post of 
 Chief Burgomaster of Berlin; but Dernburg’s thirst 
 for the joys of public office may be considered 
 effectually quenched. The loss is decidedly not his. 
 
XXI 
 
 COUNT VON BERNSTORFF 
 
 N O single department of Germany’s foreign 
 relations lies closer to the heart of the 
 Kaiser than his “American policy.” Not 
 even an Entente with his British kinsmen, to which 
 William II. has aspired passionately since the 
 Kruger telegram, has claimed more of his devotion 
 than the attainment of a close and cordial under¬ 
 standing with the world’s greatest Republic. If 
 George Washington’s embargo on entangling 
 foreign coalitions were not holy writ for Americans, 
 an alliance with Germany would be theirs for the 
 asking—if the Kaiser could have his way. The 
 enthusiasm for a German-American zweibund 
 might be less pronounced in the Fatherland at large; 
 the United States is still called and considered 
 “Dollarica” by many contemptuous Germans, who 
 would look upon political partnership with “a race 
 of money-grabbers” as beneath their Imperial 
 dignity. No such prejudices are cherished by 
 William the Hustler, who is himself often more 
 Transatlantic in his methods and viewpoint than 
 Teutonic. Times without number and in countless 
 respects he is said to resemble Colonel Roosevelt. 
 Nobody is ever prosecuted in Germany for com¬ 
 paring the Kaiser to the most typical of Americans. 
 
 176 
 

COUNT VON BERNSTORFF 
 
 Emperor William’s “American policy” was 
 initiated in 1902 when he dispatched his brother, 
 Admiral Prince Henry of Prussia, on a yacht¬ 
 launching commission to the United States. The 
 Prince’s visit became the forerunner of a decade of 
 conspicuous and unceasing courtesies to America 
 and Americans, all aimed at laying the foundation 
 of a broad political friendship. A dispatch-boat 
 in the German Navy was christened “Alice 
 Roosevelt.” The University Exchange Professor¬ 
 ship between Berlin, Columbia, and Harvard was 
 instituted. American millionaires began to crowd 
 natives at drawing-rooms of the German Court. A 
 statue of Frederick the Great was presented to 
 the United States Government. Morgan and 
 Carnegie became honoured guests at Kiel Regatta 
 week. American universities and colleges began to 
 get presents of Germanic museums with the Kaiser’s 
 card attached. There was inaugurated, all along 
 the line, what somebody dubbed the era of smiles 
 and bouquets. To introduce it at Washington 
 itself, the Kaiser sent there as his ambassador the 
 best-fitted diplomat in his service, Baron Speck von 
 Sternburg, who had lived long in the United States, 
 knew President Roosevelt well, and possessed an 
 American wife. Sternburg died in harness in 1908, 
 in the midst of brilliantly effective furtherance of 
 his Sovereign’s designs on American favour. His 
 successor was a man of the same stamp, Count 
 Johann von Bernstorff, who not only took to 
 shirt-sleeves diplomacy as gracefully as Sternburg 
 
 1 77 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 had before him, but even excelled him in the 
 arts of which an ambassador, desirous of serv¬ 
 ing his country well at Washington, must be a 
 master. 
 
 Count Bernstorff may be called the highest type 
 of modern German diplomat. With one or two 
 notable exceptions, all the other aristocrats wearing 
 gold lace and dining out on Germany’s behalf 
 abroad, are diplomatists of the old school, paragons 
 alike of formality and the circumlocutory niceties of 
 international intercourse. The Fatherland had had 
 many ministers and ambassadors of that ilk at 
 Washington before the days of Sternburg and 
 Bernstorff, and German-American relations for a 
 generation were periodically strained. 
 
 Bernstorff, by temperament and training, is the 
 kind of envoy who believes in laying his cards on 
 the table. There is nothing Machiavellian in his 
 methods. He does not transact diplomatic business 
 with a dark lantern. He is not afraid to talk. 
 Directness is the cudgel by which he lays the most 
 store. He thinks the sage who said that tarriers 
 in Rome ought to do as the Romans had ambassa¬ 
 dors especially in mind. He began cutting his cloth 
 to the American measure from the hour he set foot 
 in Massachusetts Avenue. 
 
 That accounts for the fact that Count Bernstorff, 
 who was born in London, and talks English more 
 gracefully than a good many natives, is often 
 spoken of as a “better American” than three- 
 quarters of the inhabitants of the United States. 
 
 178 
 
COUNT VON BERNSTORFF 
 
 He is an intense admirer of its institutions and 
 people, and preferred a daughter of Uncle Sam for 
 a wife to a lady of his own noble caste. Toadying, 
 however, is no part whatever of his professional 
 make-up. When German interests need to be 
 advocated at the State Department or the White 
 House, Count Bernstorff is prompt and resolute, 
 and he has an incorrigible habit of getting what he 
 wants. Pan-Germans and industrial magnates at 
 home want more than Bernstorff does, because he 
 knows just how much is to be had. They account 
 no German ambassador at Washington a success 
 who fails to annihilate the Monroe Doctrine, annex 
 South America and inaugurate free trade in the 
 United States. Bernstorff, being an optimist, 
 dreams occasionally of the Millennium, and would 
 not prove helpless if he should run across it; but 
 until it is within hailing distance he believes in con¬ 
 centrating on the pursuit of the attainable. 
 
 Trade relations are the bedrock of diplomacy 
 in the twentieth century, and German-American 
 political intercourse concerns them almost exclu¬ 
 sively. Count Bernstorff’s greatest diplomatic 
 triumph at Washington had to do with the 
 unromantic question of potash. Germany has a 
 world monopoly of that queen of fertilisers, and has 
 long laid heavy tribute on dependent foreign 
 customers. Americans buy enormous quantities 
 of it and, having become tired of what they con¬ 
 sidered extortion, bought some German mines 
 in 1910 and essayed to import their own potash. 
 
 179 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 The German Government is a mine-owner itself and 
 a potent factor in the Syndicate—the German for 
 Trust—which arbitrarily controls potash output 
 and prices. If the Americans succeeded in coming 
 into the German market and mining their own pot¬ 
 ash the Syndicate’s halcyon days were numbered. 
 To prevent such a disaster the Kaiser’s Government 
 came to the rescue with a set of laws which practi¬ 
 cally made it prohibitive for foreigners to extract 
 potash from the bowels of the German earth. 
 America protested against the violation of the pri¬ 
 vate property rights of its nationals by act of Parlia¬ 
 ment. For a while the German-American political 
 horizon was cloudier than at any time since Manila. 
 There were mutterings and veiled threats of a tariff 
 war. Bernstorff was firm, but smiling. He succeeded 
 eventually in making the United States Government 
 believe—sense of humour is one of his chief assets—• 
 that Germany’s action was based primarily upon 
 an internal policy of conserving natural resources 
 and also upon a corrective policy with respect to 
 Corporation activities. Expressed thus in terms 
 of “live issues” within the United States itself, 
 Bernstorff’s presentation of the case seemed plaus¬ 
 ible and legitimate to President Taft and Secretary 
 Knox, and the potash incident was closed. The 
 spirit of broad-gauge statesmanship which induced 
 them to accept Count Bernstorff’s argument re¬ 
 flected vastly more credit on the Washington ad¬ 
 ministration than their acceptance of the “resigna¬ 
 tion” of Dr. David Jayne Hill, the accomplished 
 
 180 
 
COUNT VON BERNSTORFF 
 
 American Ambassador at Berlin, who left office 
 under suspicion of having compromised his country 
 in the potash negotiations. It may be set down here 
 that it was the Pittsburg diplomacy, singly and 
 alone, which caused America to withdraw from the 
 controversy so ignominiously. 
 
 Bernstorff was cradled in diplomacy, for his 
 father was Prussian Minister at the Court of St. 
 James when Count Johann was born in 1862. 
 English became his mother-tongue. He served as 
 an officer in the Artillery Guards at Berlin from 
 1881 to 1889, having meantime married on his 
 twenty-fifth birthday in 1887 Miss Jeanne Lucke- 
 meyer, of New York. His diplomatic career be¬ 
 gan as an attache of the German Embassy in 
 Constantinople. Successive periods of service in the 
 Foreign Office at Berlin, the legations of Belgrade, 
 Dresden and Munich, and the embassies at St. 
 Petersburg and London, filled sixteen busy years. 
 Equipped with this wide cosmopolitan experience, 
 Count Bernstorff received his first Ministerial ap¬ 
 pointment as diplomatic agent and consul-general 
 at Cairo in 1906. For four years previous he was 
 Councillor of Embassy in London, where he was 
 an effective factor in reconstructing Anglo-German 
 relations after the bad blood engendered by the 
 Boer War. In 1908 he became German Ambassador 
 at Washington. 
 
 Count Bernstorff has always found himself 
 peculiarly at home in the American environment, 
 because of his extreme amiability and frankness. 
 
 181 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 He has met the Yankee on his own ground as a 
 story-teller, after-dinner speaker and master of 
 repartee. Asked once, shortly after his arrival in 
 Washington, at a dinner notable for the presence of 
 many Wall Street financiers, if he played poker, 
 Bernstorff replied: “It’s the only game I know.” 
 “How eminently fitting for the Kaiser to send you 
 to the United States,” was the magnate’s rejoinder. 
 In his callow days Bernstorff was addicted to tennis. 
 A superior, Count Wolff-Metternich, remarked that 
 tennis smacked of the “dancing age,” and recom¬ 
 mended golf. Bernstorff forthwith foreswore the 
 racquet for the driver. He was obviously the right 
 man for the Taft era. He cultivated a fondness for 
 baseball, too, hitherto an achievement only of 
 Chinese diplomats at Washington. An ambassador 
 who knows the value of a straight flush, and under¬ 
 stands the psychology of a sacrifice hit, is assured 
 a place in the affections of the American people, 
 which no mere alliance between their rulers and 
 governments could possibly strengthen. 
 
 Bernstorff also left behind him in Germany his 
 caste and countrymen’s contempt for the press. 
 He found that newspapermen in America were 
 not only worth knowing, but the real wielders 
 of power. He shocked the flunkeys who guard 
 the door of the Kaiser’s Embassy, by giving orders 
 that the Washington correspondents were to be 
 shown in when they called. Bernstorff was quick 
 to grasp, too, that Americans are a speech-making 
 and speech-loving nation. He found it was quite 
 
 .182 
 
COUNT VON BERNSTORFF 
 
 compatible with the dignity of the Hohenzollerns’ 
 Minister Plenipotentiary to appear at public dinners 
 and respond to toasts. He saw opportunities to 
 break lances for his Kaiser’s cause, by addressing 
 the faculties and students of colleges and universi¬ 
 ties. No foreigner in so brief a period has received 
 so many honorary degrees as Bernstorff, who is an 
 LL.D., of nine leading American institutions of 
 learning. 
 
 Bernstorff’s political ideal is unity and friendship 
 between Germany, England and the United States. 
 He does not preach it publicly, but he advocates it 
 earnestly on all possible occasions. Some day he 
 may be called to higher service at Berlin. If he 
 is, the English-speaking race will have a zealous 
 friend at the German Court. 
 
 The armour-plate patriots of Rhineland, West¬ 
 phalia and Berlin, which hanker to hang James 
 Monroe in effigy, and the export Jingoes, who hate 
 tariffs in every country but their own, look upon 
 Count Bernstorff as an egregious failure. At 
 regular and explosive intervals, they demand his 
 recall. The Kaiser is a man who knows his business, 
 and that is why he keeps Bernstorff at Washington. 
 
XXII 
 
 KRUPP VON BOHLEN 
 
 W HEN the invincible hosts of the Balkans 
 were pushing and pounding the Turk 
 back into Asia, Europe and the world 
 were fed with the legend that the primary cause 
 of the Ottoman rout was the lamentable failure of 
 Krupp artillery. There is room for difference of 
 opinion on that point. What is absolutely sure is 
 that no single aspersion cast on things German by 
 captious critics in contemporary times ever wounded 
 German susceptibilities more poignantly. The house 
 of Krupp is a national institution in the Fatherland. 
 Its name is almost as revered as that of the Hohen- 
 zollerns itself. To slander it is to affront the 
 nation. The firm’s prestige is certain to weather the 
 storm of recent events, which for a while threatened 
 to undermine it. 
 
 If the omniscient experts are right, who assert 
 that Lule Burgas and Kirk Kilisse were lost on the 
 target-fields of Meppen, fifty-two war offices and 
 general staffs throughout the world have been blun¬ 
 dering for half a century. To that many different 
 governments Krupp guns have been supplied, more 
 than thirty thousand in all. Twenty-three States 
 in Europe are among them, eighteen in America, 
 six in Asia, and five in Africa. Germany herself, 
 
 184 
 
.u Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach 
 
KRUPP VON BOHLEN 
 
 of course, heads the list of the deluded. Since the 
 great exhibition at London in 1851, when an ob¬ 
 scure Rhenish steelmaker from Essen electrified 
 the military universe with a six-pounder of flawless 
 cast steel, the German Army and Navy have bought 
 twenty-nine thousand Krupp guns. Those of them 
 which will bark to-morrow from the turrets of the 
 Kaiser’s Dreadnoughts and the ramparts of Metz 
 and Konigsberg will thunder forth a different 
 story than the cannon of the terrified and un¬ 
 trained Turk. When Armageddon descends there 
 will be men behind the guns of Germany’s artillery. 
 
 On the recent anniversary of Emperor William’s 
 birthday, the brains of Essen—the two or three 
 thousand department-chiefs and engineers who 
 conduct the Krupp works—foregathered for their 
 annual celebration. A scholarly-looking man, youth¬ 
 ful and of modest bearing and courtly manner, was 
 the orator of the occasion. “Much has been written 
 and talked of late,” he said, “about the inefficiency 
 of Krupp guns and Krupp workmanship. Is there 
 anyone among you who believes these fables? Is 
 there a man here who would not be ready any time, 
 like myself, to take the field against all comers with 
 Krupp guns and Krupp armour? I know you all 
 think as I do—that each and every man of us has 
 the utmost confidence in these things which are of 
 our very selves!” The speaker was Dr. Gustav 
 Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, husband of the 
 “cannon queen,” Bertha Krupp, and managing direc¬ 
 tor of the vast arsenal of which she is the sole owner. 
 
 185 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 Dr. Krupp von Bohlen—he is best known in that 
 abbreviated style—is no longer merely Bertha 
 Krupp’s husband. He has ceased to be simply the 
 man who married the greatest fortune in Germany, 
 and has become the master of Essen in reality as 
 well as title. Taken suddenly from diplomacy, 
 a career which he inherited and was successfully 
 pursuing, he has made himself within seven brief 
 years a worthy leader of the greatest industrial 
 organism the world has yet seen. He has proved 
 that he is not an accident. The seventy-five thou¬ 
 sand members of the Krupp staff, and the commu¬ 
 nity of three hundred thousand souls whom they 
 represent, look up to Krupp von Bohlen with the 
 same spirit of reverential loyalty which inspired 
 three generations of workmen to regard the Krupps 
 as their liege lords. They, too, would be ready to 
 follow where Krupp von Bohlen leads, behind the 
 guns and impenetrable armour they themselves have 
 forged. 
 
 Travellers across the dreary panorama of Western 
 Prussia from the North Sea to Berlin are familiar 
 with the endless forests of chimneys and smoke¬ 
 stacks which dot the landscape in that heart of 
 industrial Germany. It is at Essen, in the valley of 
 the Ruhr, that the chimneys and the smoke are 
 thickest. It is as if Sheffield and Pittsburg had 
 miraculously been transplanted and rolled into one 
 throbbing area of twelve hundred acres, two hun¬ 
 dred and thirty-five of them under roof, which 
 comprises Messrs. Krupp’s Essen works alone. 
 
 186 
 
KRUPP VON BOHLEN 
 
 There and at the three neighbouring fifteen-mile- 
 long gun ranges of Meppen, thirty-nine thousand 
 men are employed. At Krupp collieries in Rhine¬ 
 land-Westphalia and Silesia ten thousand miners 
 dig coal for Krupp branch works at Annen and 
 Gruson, where armour-plate is made, and for Krupp 
 blast furnaces at Rheinhausen, Duisburg, Neuwied 
 and Engers, which between them keep another 
 fifteen thousand hands busy. At Kiel six thousand 
 one hundred shipwrights build battleships, torpedo- 
 boats and submarines in Krupp’s fifty-five-acre 
 Germania dockyard. In Germany and far-away 
 Spain five thousand miners are disemboweling ore 
 from Krupp iron mines, to be shipped, in the case 
 of the foreign product, in Krupp steamers, which 
 unload their burden at Krupp docks in Rotterdam, 
 there to be transhipped down the Rhine, to emerge 
 some day as armour, Dreadnoughts, siege guns 
 and murderous shell, “Made in Germany.” The 
 Krupp pay-roll totals $25,000,000 a year. 
 
 Dr. Von Bohlen und Halbach—one is never quite 
 sure whether he ought to be called by his original, 
 double-barrelled name, or Krupp von Bohlen, as 
 the Kaiser gave him and his male heir permission 
 to call themselves the day the young diplomat 
 married Bertha Krupp—was Secretary of the 
 Prussian Legation at the Vatican when he met/ 
 wooed and won the cannon queen. Previously he 
 had served at the German Embassy in Washing¬ 
 ton, and at the Legation in Pekin through the try¬ 
 ing days of the Boxer Siege. He is forty-two 
 
 187 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 years old and was born at The Hague, while his 
 father was the diplomatic representative of the 
 Grand Duchy of Baden at the Netherlands Court. 
 A native of Holland, Dr. Krupp von Bohlen has 
 American blood in his veins, for his parents were 
 both born in Philadelphia. His maternal grand¬ 
 father was a general of the United States Army, 
 and lies buried in a soldier’s grave in Virginia. 
 His engagement to Fraulein Krupp was an ideal 
 love match. They became acquainted while she 
 and her mother and sister were passing an Easter 
 holiday in Italy. In October, 1906, they were 
 married at the Krupp mansion, “On the Hill,” a 
 beautiful but unpretentious home set high on one 
 of the wooded peaks which envelop Essen. The 
 Kaiser attended the wedding and toasted the couple 
 in the name of the Empire, for whose defence and 
 development the name of Krupp denotes so much. 
 
 Friedrich Alfred Krupp, the third proprietor of 
 the business, who died in 1902, aged only forty- 
 eight, had no sons, and the gigantic properties passed 
 into the sole possession of his eldest daughter, 
 Bertha, at that time a minor. Her mother, acting as 
 guardian and carrying out a testamentary provision, 
 turned the firm into a joint-stock company in 1903, 
 with a capital of $40,000,000, divided into 160,000 
 shares of $250 each, all but four of which went to 
 ^Fraulein Krupp. For the mother and younger 
 sister, Barbara, the late Herr Krupp provided 
 independently and generously, but they are poor 
 compared to the fortune of the cannon queen, 
 
 188 
 
KRUPP VON BOHLEN 
 
 which to-day is estimated at close to $75,000,000. 
 She draws 10 per cent, dividends from her shares 
 in Krupps, Ltd., now capitalised at $45,000,000, 
 and with other incomes is believed to be in the 
 enjoyment of an annual revenue which equals, if 
 it does not exceed, that of the Kaiser, which is 
 $5,500,000. The next richest person in Germany, 
 Prince Henckel von Donnersmarck, a Silesian coal 
 and iron magnate, has an income of only $3,275,- 
 000. 
 
 Germany’s richest family is one of its very sim¬ 
 plest. Thousands of middle-class households live 
 more pretentiously. Both Frau von Bohlen and 
 her husband look upon the inheritance of the 
 Krupp business as a sacred trust. They are far 
 more interested in the development of the firm’s 
 great fund for invalid employes, to which they are 
 constantly adding, or in their splendid working¬ 
 men’s colonies, or in the extensive homes for aged, 
 incapacitated and pensioned workmen, than in de¬ 
 feating Schneider-Creusot, Vickers-Maxim or the 
 Bethlehem Steel Company in a competition for 
 foreign gun and armour orders. The castles of 
 kings are open to them, but it is seldom they are 
 persuaded to desert the homely family life of Villa 
 Hiigel for the glittering joys of high society. In 
 Berlin, when the aristocrats and plutocrats of the 
 realm foregather for the Court season, Herr and 
 Frau von Bohlen are rare guests. When they come, 
 they live unobtrusively at an hotel. Their travelling 
 at other times is mostly confined to a brief “cure” 
 
 189 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 outing at some German spa. They are old-time 
 frequenters of Kiel for the June regatta week, 
 their speedy schooner Germania being an ancient 
 foe of the Kaiser’s Meteor. Yachting is their keen¬ 
 est hobby. But the vast bulk of their time and 
 thought is devoted to their home, their three chil¬ 
 dren and their workpeople. 
 
 Their domestic and philanthropic activities by 
 no means debar them from maintaining a lively 
 and highly intelligent interest in their gigantic busi¬ 
 ness. Herr Krupp von Bohlen, since 1908 the Chair¬ 
 man of the Company’s board, is at his office in 
 the big new administration building, in the centre 
 of the Essen plant, every morning at nine. He 
 devotes the entire forenoon to conferences with 
 subordinate directors and department-chiefs. The 
 reins of the colossal undertaking are always in his 
 hands. He is said to have mastered the mysteries 
 of steel to an astonishing degree. Many important 
 extensions of plant have taken place under his 
 direct supervision. His wife has known about ingots 
 and guns and armour for a long time. Her late 
 father grounded her thoroughly in the elementary 
 principles of the trade which the Krupps have fol¬ 
 lowed for over one hundred years. She goes 
 regularly to the administrative offices, sometimes 
 three or four times a week, and is accustoming her 
 five-year-old son, the future owner of Krupps, to 
 the rumble and roar of rolling-mills by taking him 
 along on occasion. Sometimes Frau von Bohlen 
 attends meetings of her board of directors—she is 
 
 190 
 
KRUPP VON BOHLEN 
 
 seldom outvoted—and has been known more than 
 once, with a flash of genuine genius, to suggest 
 ideas and policies of far-reaching import. 
 
 Though brought up to be a cannon queen by her 
 father, Frau von Bohlen’s education at the hands of 
 her mother was essentially that of a girl in whom the 
 homely virtues of the German Hausfrau are incul¬ 
 cated as those which most adorn womankind. 
 Like all of her class, she is an accomplished mother, 
 besides being a mistress of the minor talents of 
 language, music and equestrianism. She is neither 
 a suffragette nor a butterfly. She is vastly more 
 absorbed in the A.B.C.’s of her children than in votes 
 for women or the latest intelligence from the Rue 
 de la Paix. Her public appearances, even in Essen, 
 are extremely infrequent. Almost always they are 
 confined to the recurring philanthropic or com¬ 
 memorative festivities of the works. She never 
 fails to preside over the annual celebration of her 
 father’s birthday, which is the occasion for bestow¬ 
 ing money and other golden mementoes on employes 
 who have completed twenty-five years of service. 
 The number averages four hundred annually, and 
 Frau von Bohlen insists on a kid-gloved handshake 
 wjth every one of her horny-fisted veterans. That 
 is one of the little reasons why the 16-inch gun 
 makers of Essen love their twenty-seven-year-old 
 mistress, to whom their weal is a religion. 
 
 Villa Hiigel, the Krupp home, is a capacious 
 dwelling-place, designed to dispense much and 
 comfortable, but never ostentatious, hospitality. 
 
 I 9 I 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 Its guest-chambers are almost always occupied. 
 English and American friends who visit Herr and 
 Frau von Bohlen invariably come away charmed 
 with the unaffected personalities of their hosts 
 and unable to recall a word, a thought or a bit of 
 environment which suggested anything but sim¬ 
 plicity and complete domestic felicity. The Krupp 
 von Bohlens are inspiring reminders that the age 
 of luxury and splurge is still adorned by folk to 
 whom great riches can never be a curse. 
 
XXIII 
 
 MAXIMILIAN HARDEN 
 
 E MPEROR WILLIAM’S reign has been 
 singularly devoid of scandal. The private 
 lives of himself and his large family are 
 an unblemished record of exemplary living. The 
 tongue of gossip has never busied itself with the 
 Kaiser in an unworthy connection. In one momen¬ 
 tous instance he proved unfortunate in the choice 
 of his friends. That is as near as William II.’s name 
 has ever come to being dragged in the mire. It 
 emerged from the unlovely affair untarnished. 
 
 To discuss Maximilian Harden’s crusade against 
 Prince Eulenburg is a thankless task in a review of 
 the men who have made the Kaiser’s reign notable, 
 but the review would be incomplete without it. 
 The upheaval caused by Harden’s revelations was 
 the most striking victory wrought in the name of 
 public opinion which Modern Germany has yet 
 witnessed. Journalism, which had still to conquer 
 in the Fatherland a position commensurate with 
 the one it has long commanded abroad, was a power 
 when the Moltke-Harden-Eulenburg trials were 
 ended. How much of a power was not recognised 
 at the time, nor is fully realised even now, though 
 
 193 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 the “November crisis” a year later was designed 
 to bring it vividly home to the most reluctant 
 circles of German society. 
 
 Vilified and ostracised by super-patriots as an 
 outcast, traitor and slanderer, stoned by a large 
 section of his own colleagues in sheer envy or myopic 
 conception of his epoch-making achievement, Maxi¬ 
 milian Harden is to-day indisputably the command¬ 
 ing figure in the field of German polemics. No 
 man now writing in the language of Goethe and 
 Schiller has so large a personal following, or so 
 influential a voice. An incurable iconoclast, affecter 
 of stylistic flourishes far above the head of the 
 average reader, a literary futurist who revels in the 
 staccato and the cryptic, the editor of the Zukunft, 
 whether writing or talking—he does both equally 
 well—is assured attentive hearing from countless 
 and sympathetic ears. He has the fascination of 
 Horace Walpole and the sledge hammer incisiveness 
 of Cobbett. He believes heads were made to be hit. 
 If they bear a crown, or wobble on the shoulders 
 of pedantic Chancellors, he hits them all the harder. 
 He is a fierce patriot, but not a jingo. No publicist, 
 past or present, ever dipped his pen into the vitriol 
 more fearlessly. Shining marks are the targets at 
 which he tilts most gleefully. He has served two 
 terms of imprisonment for what he describes as 
 “alleged lese-majeste,” and spent the periods of his 
 incarceration at Fortress Weichselmiinde—six 
 months each—sharpening his lance for fresh jousts. 
 
 For the purposes of this sketch I asked Harden to 
 194 
 
MAXIMILIAN HARDEN 
 
 supply his own version of the episode with which 
 history will chiefly identify him. He summarises 
 it with characteristic lucidity. “In the affair of 
 Eulenburg and Company,” he says, “the gentlemen 
 whom I have fought openly, and from purely polit¬ 
 ical motives, tried to hold me to the indefinite and 
 casual intimations I had made, and which were then 
 intelligible only to themselves. They thought my 
 insinuations incapable of substantiation before a 
 court of law. This finally compelled me, after 
 sparing them more than enough, to come forward 
 with the proofs. I did it reluctantly, having warned 
 them often. The rest you know.” 
 
 It was a distressing concatenation of events which 
 were to ensue; the incriminating articles in the 
 Zukunft, hinting vaguely at unspeakable conditions 
 in the entourage of the Kaiser; the boldness of 
 the Crown Prince in bringing them to his father’s 
 attention; the summary disappearance of Prince 
 Philip zu Eulenburg—poet, musician, diplomat and 
 wirepuller—from the circle of the Emperor’s 
 intimates; the enforced resignation of General 
 Count Kuno von Moltke, Commandant of Berlin, 
 and Count Wilhelm von Hohenau, cousin and 
 aid-de-camp of his Majesty; Moltke’s private 
 action against Harden for libel, with its painful 
 disclosure of moral laxity in the aristocracy and 
 the Army; Harden’s acquittal; the succeeding action 
 against him, this time a Crown prosecution, with 
 Harden in the dock, which was to “vindicate” 
 Moltke and ended in a gaol sentence for the editor, 
 
 195 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 which he has never served; Harden’s merciless 
 revenge in the form of proceedings for perjury 
 against Eulenburg, already a social vagrant and 
 physical wreck; the broken favourite’s tragic 
 appearances as a prisoner on a stretcher, who is still 
 under indictment and surveillance as an invalid 
 awaiting trial. Such was the apparently endless 
 reign of terror in which Harden’s campaign against 
 the Inner Round Table of the Supreme War Lord 
 engulfed the country. Germans eradicated its 
 nauseous memories from their nostrils as speedily 
 as possible. Moltke and Hohenau vanished as if 
 obliterated. Where they are even at this hour 
 nobody knows or cares. Eulenburg, ruined and 
 disgraced, was permitted to retire to his feudal 
 castle of Liebenberg, formerly the scene of annual 
 sojourns by the Kaiser. Count Johannes Lynar, 
 another of the clique, was cashiered from the Army 
 and sent to gaol for a year and a half. France 
 removed from her Embassy in Berlin a Charge 
 d’Affaires who had been Eulenburg’s friend. The 
 camarilla, which had for a generation been one of 
 the dominating forces in politics and Court life, 
 which had helped to overthrow Bismarck, and was 
 plotting for the downfall of Prince Bulow, was 
 annihilated beyond resurrection. Germany had 
 been made to blush before the world, but Harden’s 
 work was done. 
 
 Harden had opportunity to ring all the changes of 
 his versatile personality during his first trial. An 
 actor for a brief period of his callow days, he played 
 
 196 
 
MAXIMILIAN HARDEN 
 
 the part again in those fateful days at Old Moabit 
 in the autumn of 1907. Trim, unafraid, alert and 
 relentless, he practically conducted his own defence. 
 German legal practice permits a litigant wide 
 declamatory latitude. Harden smiles and bows to 
 acquaintances, betokening confidence and eagerness 
 for the fray. Before the trial is an hour old he has 
 manoeuvred its course so that the pale Count von 
 Moltke seems the real defendant, cowering under 
 the lash of some merciless Public Prosecutor. 
 Harden enters his plea of justification. He staggers 
 the Court with a forecast of the damning evidence 
 in his ammunition-chest. The Judge intervenes, 
 as is his duty under the Prussian code, to propose a 
 compromise. “In the interests of our whole 
 country,” he beseeches the editor to consent to a 
 settlement out of court. Tense, defiant, Harden 
 rises. In accents of splendid disdain he snarls he 
 would rather go to prison than recede or compound. 
 “Between me and that man,” he thunders, levelling 
 an accusing finger at Moltke, “there is no possibility 
 of compromise on this earth!” The trial must 
 proceed. 
 
 Four days it continues, a forensic struggle of 
 surpassing bitterness, with no quarter the slogan 
 of both prosecution and defence. No court scene 
 ever staged by Booth or Irving rivals it in dramatic 
 grimness. Moltke’s attempts at rehabilitation 
 crumble pitiably. Theatrical to the tips of his 
 fingers, Harden, who has thrown Court and nation 
 into hourly consternation with revelations of 
 
 197 . 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 State secrets come straight to him “from above,” 
 plays his trump card last—the Kaiser’s own indict¬ 
 ment of the three figures whose names have been 
 bandied all the week. “Away with Eulenburg, 
 away with Hohenau for ever! There is nothing 
 definite against Moltke, but he must remain on 
 half-pay. Let him prove his integrity! Purified 
 or atoned!” An impassioned plea of self-defence 
 by the defendant, and the curtain falls on the first 
 act of the most harrowing tragedy New Germany 
 has yet faced. Then, two days later, proclamation 
 of Harden’s acquittal, and a welcome by the popu¬ 
 lace such as a conqueror might envy. 
 
 Harden, who was born and educated in Berlin, 
 is approaching his fifty-second birthday. Thirst for 
 freedom and family bickerings drove him from 
 home when a mere lad, to pursue for a spell the 
 career of an itinerant actor. Though he decided 
 that histrionics were not his forte, his early court¬ 
 ing of the Muse saturated his whole being, for his 
 bearing and tactics always smack of the footlights. 
 After a more or less breadless season as literary 
 and dramatic critic, he wrote his first book, a series 
 of political satires, under the pseudonym of “Apos- 
 tata.” In October, 1892 he issued the first number 
 of Zukunft. 
 
 Harden’s talents as a pungent commentator on 
 current events attracted the attention of Bismarck 
 about a year after the Iron Chancellor’s dismissal. 
 The dropped pilot invited the young editor to visit 
 him, and until Bismarck’s death he was a frequent 
 
 198 
 
MAXIMILIAN HARDEN 
 
 and welcome guest at Friedrichsruh. No living 
 man knows as much of Bismarck’s unpublished 
 history as Harden. Diagnosticians of the pathology 
 of his uncompromising warfare on most of the 
 events and institutions of the present reign ascribe it 
 to Harden’s veneration for Bismarck and a vow to 
 avenge the ignominious manner of the empire- 
 maker’s retirement. 
 
 Zukunft, the little weekly in which Harden pours 
 out his heart, has come to be the megaphone 
 through which discontented Germany roars. People 
 look upon it as an unterrified tribune which will 
 expose shams and air grievances plausibly and forci¬ 
 bly. Information drifts to Harden in the most 
 miraculous fashion, from the lowest and the highest 
 in the land. Cabinet Ministers, men of affairs and 
 plain sons of the people come to him with their 
 woes and wrongs, often with their intrigues, con¬ 
 fident that his trenchant pen is the surest means of 
 ventilating the one and righting the other. Zukunft 
 has an immense circulation, and produces Harden 
 a handsome income. He is in as great demand 
 as a public speaker as his writings. During the 
 winter he lectures occasionally in Berlin and outside, 
 and sometimes responds to calls from abroad. His 
 theme is always political. A natural orator, his 
 style suffers only from staginess. He is fond of 
 breaking off in the middle of a phrase or sentence, 
 to accentuate the effect of a statement or idea. His 
 lecture public is so large that a mere announcement 
 of his appearance means a sold-out house within 
 
 199 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 twenty-four hours. He minces words on his feet 
 even less than at his writing desk. 
 
 Harden closely resembles Josef Kainz, the late 
 Viennese tragedian, in looks, mannerisms and 
 stature. Slight, though muscular of build, ascetic 
 and stern, his external appearance is not found 
 prepossessing by people who meet him for the first 
 time. Their initial impression is that of a crabbed 
 figure with an oblong head, crowned by a wealth 
 of curly dark hair fringing an intensely intellectual 
 face. Out of it flash two deeply penetrating eyes. 
 But Harden captivates on five minutes’ acquaintance. 
 He proves to possess a winning smile, a wonderfully 
 receptive mind, a temperament which is both modest 
 and fiery, and an arsenal of information about the 
 great events, the big men and the undercurrents of 
 German life. You come away from his picturesque 
 villa in the sylvan Grunewald, understanding why 
 his enemies fear him, and no longer wondering why 
 he counts powerful friends by the score. 
 
 You hear him called a common scold in Berlin, 
 but Germany would be the poorer without him. 
 
XXIV 
 
 VON JAGOW 
 
 F OR the fifth time within ten years the man¬ 
 agement of German foreign affairs has been 
 placed in new hands. Herr Gottlieb von 
 Jagow—pronounced Yah-go—was summoned from 
 the Ambassadorship in Rome at the beginning of 
 1913 to become the successor of the late Herr von 
 Kiderlen-Waechter as the nominal director of the 
 Fatherland’s external relations—nominal, be it 
 noted, because the fear is cherished that the appoint¬ 
 ment of a diplomat of stereotyped and limited ex¬ 
 perience denotes a return to the conditions under 
 which German Foreign Secretaries were mere clerks 
 to more exalted superiors. Forceful Kiderlen broke 
 with that tradition. Von Jagow’s record and ante¬ 
 cedents, though untarnished, hardly justify the 
 belief that he, too, will insist upon being chief of 
 the Ausivartiges Amt in more than name only. 
 
 I have said that Herr von Jagow was 
 “summoned” from Rome to succeed Kiderlen. 
 “Dragged” is really the word, for it is an open secret 
 that he came with a reluctance which almost bor¬ 
 dered on insubordination. The German Foreign 
 Secretaryship is, without doubt, the least coveted 
 
 201 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 portfolio in the whole Imperial Government. None 
 offers so brilliant an opportunity to fail. None 
 is so incessantly in the fierce limelight of carping- 
 criticism. It has been the graveyard of more than 
 one reputation. Of no Minister of the Kaiser are 
 such herculean deeds expected. On him rests the 
 burden of gratifying the gnawing ambition of Ger¬ 
 many for a place in the sun. Two Foreign Secre¬ 
 taries within a decade died in harness, overworked 
 and nerve-shattered. Will Von Jagow succeed where 
 Von Richthofen, Von Tschirschky, Von Schon and 
 Von Kiderlen-Waechter failed? Will he, too, in 
 the pursuit of his country’s ardent desire for terri¬ 
 torial expansion, accomplish nothing better than 
 the addition of thousands of square miles of Congo 
 swamp to the Kaiser’s realms? Will he win another 
 Heligoland for the flag in one of the seven seas— 
 in Walfisch Bay, or on the Persian Gulf? Will he 
 extend Germany’s colonial frontiers in the Dark 
 Continent till they envelop Portuguese Africa? Can 
 he gratify her longings for a sphere of influence 
 to be called Asia Minor? Can he cajole America 
 into acquiescence in a German coaling-station or 
 naval base somewhere in the Western Atlantic? 
 These are the questions his compatriots, and not 
 alone fire-eating Pan-Germans, are asking. They 
 wonder, with undisguised scepticism, whether the 
 forty-nine year old bachelor, whose diplomatic 
 career has been confined to attache posts at Ham¬ 
 burg, Munich, The Hague and Luxemburg, and 
 four years of Ambassadorship in Rome, will 
 
 202 
 
VON JAGOW 
 
 prove equal to the task his Imperial master has set 
 him. 
 
 Von Jagow was indubitably the Emperor’s 
 personal choice, and, moreover, his insistent choice. 
 The sentimental in the Kaiser’s kaleidoscopic make¬ 
 up is not the least distinguished of his attractive 
 traits. He has an incorrigible weakness for Bonn 
 Borussians, as the members of the famous Rhine 
 University’s historic and exclusive student Corps 
 are called. William II. is a Borussian, and his 
 new Foreign Secretary is therefore his “brother.” 
 
 From the Borussians the Kaiser has chosen his 
 best friend, Prince Fiirstenberg. With a Kaiser, 
 Foreign Secretary and Man-behind-the-Throne who 
 •are all old boys of Borussia, the Bonn Corps may 
 •be said to be in partial command of the ship 
 of State. A dozen other high officers of Govern¬ 
 ment owe their eminence, among other qualities, 
 to the fact that they are entitled to wear the 
 peaked Stiirmer and black-white ribbon of the 
 Corps. At the opening of an exhibition in Berlin 
 this spring the Kaiser was observed conversing 
 familiarly with a somewhat diminutive figure of a 
 man, whom nobody recognised, but whom His 
 Majesty addressed in the form of Du (thou), in 
 Germany the highwater mark of intimacy and affec¬ 
 tion. It was Von Jagow, the Corpsbrudcr of Bonn, 
 whom his Imperial college “chum” had just made 
 German Foreign Secretary. 
 
 The Kaiser was so anxious that Herr von Jagow 
 should take up the reins in the Wilhelmstrasse, that 
 
 203 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 he even induced the diplomat to renounce objections 
 to North Germany as an abode for unrobust con¬ 
 stitutions, and exchange the salubrious atmosphere 
 of Rome for the climatic caprices of Berlin. So 
 the newest maker of history in the rambling shack 
 of a building which still does service as Germany’s 
 Foreign Office at least starts out on what Baron 
 Marschall would have called a “steep and stony 
 path,” in a fine spirit of loyalty to his sovereign. 
 For the rest, his deeds must tell. 
 
 Herr von Jagow is the diametrical antithesis 
 in physique and temperament of his blunt and ag¬ 
 gressive predecessor. Kiderlen was big and girthy. 
 Jagow is slight and attenuated. A description 
 which doubtless does him injustice pictures him as 
 misanthropic. Kiderlen’s characteristic note, apart 
 from bluffness, was bubbling good nature. He 
 had a splendid disregard of the little niceties on 
 which the professional diplomat lays stress. Jagow 
 has a distinct predilection for such proprieties, 
 coupled with natural charm which promptly in¬ 
 troduced a new atmosphere into the Ambassadorial 
 reception-room at Wilhelmstrasse 76. He feels a 
 bit strange and nervous in his fresh surroundings. 
 He has a habit of glancing about him furtively, as 
 if not quite sure of his ground. He is punctiliously 
 well-dressed, and is most at home, one gathers, in 
 the drawing-room or at the dinner table. He is a 
 book-lover and has a cultivated artistic taste. If he 
 has inherited ancestral virtues, he should prove a 
 statesman. Many of his forbears have played emi- 
 
 204 
 
VON JAGOW 
 
 nent roles in Prussian political history, especially 
 in their native Mark of Brandenburg. In the 
 Avenue of Victory, that sepulchral open-air Wal- 
 halla which the Kaiser has hewn through the Tier- 
 garten for the inculcation of patriotism, and to the 
 horror of sculpture connoisseurs, is a bust of a Von 
 Jagow flanking the statue of one of the electors 
 whom he served. The new Foreign Secretary is 
 following in the footsteps of his progenitors in be¬ 
 coming a paladin of the Crown. 
 
 Von Jagow has been in the diplomatic service 
 seventeen years, but only the Ambassadorship at 
 Rome, which he occupied for four years, gives a 
 line on his capacities. He represented Germany in 
 Italy at a delicate period. Austria-Hungary and 
 Italy, the Fatherland’s partners in the Triple 
 Alliance, have for years been on cat-and-dog terms. 
 A political divorce court would long ago have sev¬ 
 ered the union between Vienna and Rome on 
 grounds of incompatibility. Berlin itself thinks 
 Rome could easily be convicted of infidelity because 
 of what Prince Buelow used to call her fondness 
 for extra dances with France and England. Von 
 Jagow’s mission was to act the part of mediator 
 between the “allies,” one of whom owns, the other 
 covets, Trieste. The Triple Alliance was expiring 
 in two or three years, and Austrian-Italian differ¬ 
 ences needed to be smoothed over, if not composed, 
 if the pact were to be worth rewriting. It has al¬ 
 ready been formally announced, far in advance of 
 the expiration date, that the Dreibund is to be pro- 
 
 205 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 longed for another term of years. Von Jagow un¬ 
 doubtedly did his full share to bring about an 
 atmosphere in Rome which made it possible for the 
 Marquis di San Giuliano to declare, in tones which 
 did not lack sincerity, a few days ago, that the 
 Triple Alliance was still the keystone of Italian 
 foreign policy. 
 
 The Turco-Italian War made another call for 
 consummate tact and diplomatic skill on the part 
 of Germany’s representative at Rome. Jagow’s 
 detractors at Berlin—every German Ambassador 
 has armchair critics at home who would do things 
 infinitely better—blamed him for not anticipating 
 the outbreak of hostilities in Tripoli, and in not 
 inducing Germany’s ally to spare the susceptibilities 
 and respect the territory of Germany’s friend. 
 German public sentiment was almost unreservedly 
 on the side of the Turks. Even in official estimation, 
 there is reason to believe, Italy’s war in North 
 Africa savoured, both in conception and execution, 
 of a freebooting expedition. Italians realised that 
 Germany was on the side of their enemy. That 
 Jagow nevertheless kept his country’s diplomatic 
 prestige at a high point during that strained time 
 may be regarded evidence of ability of no mean 
 degree. 
 
 But Herr von Jagow will be judged by what he 
 will accomplish—not by what he has hitherto done 
 or failed to do. His field of usefulness is world¬ 
 wide, for the sun never sets on what the German 
 Empire would like to be. His subordinates and 
 
 206 
 
VON JAGOW 
 
 colleagues at the Foreign Office, who have known 
 of his previous career from the inside, bespeak for 
 him a first-rate future. He does not look as if there 
 were a Bismarck within him, but he has all the vir¬ 
 tues which count in modern diplomacy—urbanity, 
 industry and loyalty. His first public utterances 
 have appropriately concerned Germany’s paramount 
 foreign issue—relations with England. He has 
 told the Reichstag that matters with Britain are 
 taking a more than ordinarily friendly course. 
 He described them as “a delicate flower,” whose 
 growth ought not to be hampered by premature 
 touching. Von Jagow himself is a paragon of 
 conciliation. Externally he seems almost inoffen¬ 
 sive. The mailed fist having failed grievously to 
 make John Bull and Michel lie down together, there 
 are surface indications that the velvet glove is now 
 to be tried. That is the only sort of gauntlet, one 
 imagines, into which the new German Foreign 
 Secretary’s hand will ever fit. But you never can 
 tell. Kiderlen came in like a lion and went out 
 like a lamb. Perhaps Jagow will reverse the order. 
 
XXV 
 
 VON DER GOLTZ 
 
 G ERMANY is spending $262,500,000 on in¬ 
 creasing the striking force of her Army. 
 The bulk of this vast new tribute to the 
 Moloch of militarism is to be devoted to strength¬ 
 ening the position in the East. The Kaiser’s “year 
 of sacrifice” has in mind the struggle which Ger¬ 
 mans religiously believe to be inevitable—the 
 supreme clash which is to decide forever whether 
 German or Slav is to prevail in Europe. Reduced 
 to naked essentials, the paramount necessity, in 
 Teuton estimation, is the immediate consolidation 
 of the military resources of Germany and Austria- 
 Hungary for war against the allied armies of Russia, 
 France, Bulgaria, Greece, Servia and Montenegro. 
 Before the rise of the youngest Great Power, the 
 Balkan Confederation, Austria was relied upon to 
 lend Germany such help in a war against Russia 
 that the mass of the Kaiser’s Army would be free 
 for operations in Western Europe. But events have 
 so radically altered the balance of power in South- 
 Eastern Europe that Austria’s military worth to 
 her German ally, it is asserted, has been reduced 
 by at least 40 per cent. Germany expects now to 
 
 208 
 
4 
 
VON DER GOLTZ 
 
 have to deal with Russia and France almost single- 
 handed. 
 
 If Deutschtum and Slaventum were to come to 
 grips to-morrow, Germany’s main armies operating 
 against Russia would in all probability be com¬ 
 manded by Field-Marshal General Baron von der 
 Goltz. It will no doubt strike the non-German 
 reader as incredible that the organiser of the worst- 
 beaten army in modern history is looked upon as 
 a prospective German generalissimo. Kirk Kilisse 
 and Lule Burgas are assumed abroad to have buried 
 Goltz Pasha’s reputation. Many of the slanderous 
 anonymous postcards addressed to him during and 
 since the Balkan War indicate that some of his own 
 countrymen are of the same mind. But there is 
 reason to believe that a different opinion prevails 
 at the German General Staff. Von der Goltz 
 remains Inspector-General of the Second Army 
 Inspection. The Guards, the flower of the Army, 
 have just been added to his Inspection. William II. 
 is not the man to tolerate the retention of a dis¬ 
 credited soldier in so vital a position, especially bluff, 
 outspoken Goltz, who is not a personal favourite of 
 the Supreme War Lord. • Goltz Pasha—the title 
 of which he is still proud—will lead the Germans 
 across the Vistula, as they believe they eventually 
 will be led, because he is almost universally con¬ 
 sidered the Fatherland’s greatest living soldier. 
 
 Field-Marshal von der Goltz’ reputation as an 
 organiser rests in his own country on his work as 
 general of the First Army Corps—the Russian 
 209 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 border legions—at Konigsberg, which he com¬ 
 manded between 1902 and 1907. The assignment 
 to the command of the corps of his native East 
 Prussia Avas particularly agreeable to him and to the 
 material with which he had to work. Just Avhat 
 Goltz accomplished in his district is the well-kept 
 secret of the Staff at Berlin; but it is known to have 
 been of a superlatively effective character. He is 
 distinctly a soldier of imagination and initiative, and 
 the peasant-farmers of East Prussia could unfold, 
 if they dared, a scheme of defensive arrangements 
 mapped out by Goltz, the originality and scope of 
 which, they say, are destined some day to open the 
 eyes of both friend and foe. At Konigsberg Goltz 
 had full play for his tactical genius. He devoted 
 his energies to developing the strategic training of 
 the First Corps, which will be called upon to bear the 
 brunt of the early fighting with Russia. He incul¬ 
 cated relentlessly in officers and troops the doctrine 
 that soldiering is all work and no play, and himself 
 served as a tireless example of the theory. His 
 critiques of manoeuvres were extraordinarily instruc¬ 
 tive. New points of view Avere constantly being 
 revealed by him. An officer who served in Goltz’ 
 corps was looked upon as having studied the arts 
 of war at the fountain-head. 
 
 Goltz is seventy years old, and has been writing, 
 fighting and Avorking for more than fifty years of 
 the time. Another great German soldier who is 
 still living, Field-Marshal Count von Haseler, is 
 described by Goltz as his model of the workingman- 
 
 2IQ 
 
VON DER GOLTZ 
 
 soldier. Haseler, who was pounding the Sixteenth 
 Army Corps on the French frontier into invincibility 
 about the same time Goltz was hammering his East 
 Prussians into shape, was Goltz’ superior at the 
 headquarters of Prince Frederick Karl during the 
 Franco-Prussian War. “Well,” ran Haseler’s greet¬ 
 ing to the young officer, “you’ll at least learn 
 here what men and horses can do, and it won’t 
 do you any harm.” At the headquarters of the 
 Red Prince, Goltz had expected to move in a 
 paradise of magnificent strategic operations. 
 “Not until later,” he has written, “did I come to 
 understand how much more important it is in war 
 than all theories, to recognise what men and horses 
 are capable of accomplishing. I had the notion 
 that if an officer had done four hours’ service in the 
 forenoon and two or three hours in the afternoon, 
 he had a legitimate right to seek diversion. I soon 
 found myself asking when Count Haseler rested, 
 ate and drank, not to mention diversion or pleasure, 
 and I began to realise that a soldier has only done 
 his duty when at any given moment he cannot find 
 a single thing to do—which is seldom the case.” 
 Goltz confesses that the thoroughness and Spartan 
 simplicity of Plaseler, his uncompromising frank¬ 
 ness, his almost unnatural contempt of difficulties 
 and exertion, “gave my whole military life a dif¬ 
 ferent direction than it would otherwise have 
 taken.” 
 
 Field-Marshal von der Goltz’ fame would be 
 secure if he had never done anything but write. 
 
 211 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 He revealed literary talent during precocious days 
 as a cadet at Gross-Lichterfelde, romance then 
 being his forte. His first books were novels, which 
 he sold to help support his widowed mother. Goltz’ 
 initial work of an important character, “Leon 
 Gambetta and His Armies,” brought him both fame 
 and trouble. It espoused the reduction of Germany’s 
 three-year period of military service to two years, 
 a reform earnestly advocated by the Liberal and 
 Socialist parties. Von der Goltz was suspected of 
 “radicalism” unbecoming an officer wearing the 
 King’s coat. By way of disciplinary punishment 
 he was transferred to a line-captaincy at Gera. 
 The Gambetta book, published in 1877, aroused 
 national attention. Pilloried as heresy bordering 
 on insubordination, it paved the way for the 
 adoption of two-year service sixteen years later. 
 
 Goltz’ best-known literary production, “A Nation 
 in Arms,” appeared in 1883. It is a brilliant and 
 unanswerable apotheosis of obligatory military duty. 
 Englishmen who hesitate to identify themselves 
 with Lord Roberts’ crusade for National Service 
 will find food for grave reflection in “A Nation 
 in Arms,” and a wealth of argument applicable to 
 Britain’s present-day ignominious military position. 
 The book has been translated into a dozen languages 
 and has helped many a Government to over¬ 
 come opposition to the citizen-army theory. 
 Recently Von der Goltz was placed at the head of 
 the “Young Germany League,” a new movement 
 designed primarily to counteract the anti-militaristic 
 
 212 
 
VON DER GOLTZ 
 
 propaganda of the Social Democracy. His selection 
 was a recognition of the fact that he incorporates, 
 as no other living German, the idea of compulsory 
 service for national defence. “Campaigns of 
 Frederick the Great,” “Army Leadership,” and 
 “The War History of Germany in the Nineteenth 
 Century,” are Goltz’ best-known subsequent works. 
 In the last-named he reveals himself a confirmed 
 apostle of the theory that arms and war are the sole 
 source of German greatness. “Through the sharp¬ 
 ness of our sword,” he declares, “not through the 
 sharpness of our mind, was the dream of all Ger¬ 
 mans finally realised. Our material development is 
 taking place on so rapid a scale that it must cause 
 misgivings, for it increases the sense of security and 
 lust for enjoyment. Both have invariably proved 
 perilous to a nation. Only so long as the cultivation 
 of the warlike spirit keeps pace with general cultured 
 development has a nation been able to maintain its 
 place in history.” All of Goltz’ writings are marked 
 by a picturesqueness and lucidity which stamp him 
 a master of literary style. 
 
 Though a believer in strong armaments, Goltz 
 does not agree with Napoleon that God fights on 
 the side of the biggest battalions. He would rather 
 lead a single regiment of efficients into battle than 
 a corps of mediocrities. He is not a victim of rage 
 des nombrcs. 
 
 Goltz was summoned to reconstruct Sultan Abdul 
 Hamid’s military establishment in 1883. He 
 remained in Turkey until 1895. He found the 
 213 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 Ottoman troops a disjointed body of raw fighting 
 men and turned them into an army. When one 
 hears of the incessant opposition, intrigues and 
 suspicion which dogged Goltz’ footsteps from the 
 hour of his arrival in Constantinople, one wonders 
 that he accomplished, even at the end of twelve 
 years of patient effort, as much as he did. Abdul 
 Hamid surrounded him with spies, who blocked him 
 at every stage. Goltz once succeeded in extorting 
 permission from the Sultan to hold manoeuvres 
 faintly resembling war. They were prohibited at 
 the eleventh hour because the minions of the Caliph 
 had made his Majesty believe that a conspiracy 
 against the throne was the real object of the opera¬ 
 tions. The nerve-wracked and superstitious auto¬ 
 crat never allowed ball-cartridge to be fired by his 
 troops. His artillery was not once permitted to 
 practice with ammunition. Mauser rifles bought 
 in Germany lay unpacked at Constantinople for six 
 years. Those were typical of the conditions under 
 which Goltz worked. Yet, by dint of herculean 
 labour and consummate patience, he left Turkey in 
 possession of an organisation worthy of the name of 
 an army, with a cohesive staff and inspection system, 
 with a reserve, Landwehr and Landsturm, with a 
 military school, with a topographical archive and 
 with a comprehensive recruiting scheme. He 
 rearmed the infantry and artillery, and worked out 
 plans of campaign for every contingency except 
 war against Montenegro. In 1909, after the Revo¬ 
 lution had enthroned the Young Turks, they invited 
 
 214 
 
VON DER GOLTZ 
 
 Von der Goltz to return to Turkey and reorganise 
 the new army, but he declined. In 1910 he spent 
 two months among his former pupils, and came 
 away with the impression that Turkish military 
 destinies were now in competent hands. In the 
 events of the autumn of 1912, he was doomed to be 
 bitterly disappointed. 
 
 Turkey’s disasters have been called Germany’s 
 defeats, with little actual basis of fact or reason, 
 as unprejudiced observers now agree. The troops 
 which crumbled before the gallant legions of Bul¬ 
 garia, Servia, Greece and Montenegro were not the 
 army which Goltz trained and organised. They 
 were an unready, underfed and demoralised rabble. 
 An army into whose marrow German teachers for 
 thirty years had drilled offensive as the first and 
 last law of war threw that dogma to the winds and 
 remained stubbornly on an impotent and wretched 
 defensive. It was not Goltz who taught Turkish 
 artillery to mount their guns on the sky-line, of 
 which even a near-sighted enemy might find the 
 range. Bulgarian officers tell of an engagement 
 wherein there was one Turkish position which had 
 a concealed battery. It was in command of German 
 officers and it was not dislodged. Sixty German 
 officers participated in the gallant defence of 
 Adrianople, and it is safe to assume their role 
 was not a passive one. It seems as unfair to 
 charge Goltz and German training with the miserable 
 fiasco of the Turkish Army as it would be to blame 
 Admiral Gamble and British training for the sorry 
 
 215 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 showing of the Turkish Fleet, or French training for 
 the fact that the war was lost under Nazim Pasha, 
 who studied at St. Cyr. Committee politics, Kismet 
 and degeneracy were the elements which combined 
 to conquer the Turk. Von der Goltz himself has 
 not abandoned faith in the inborn military virtues 
 of Islam. He calls the resistance of Adrianople, 
 Scutari, Tchatalja and Janina glorious, and declares 
 it shows that the blood of the men of Plevna, 
 despite Kirk Kilisse, Lule Burgas and Kumanowa, 
 still flows in Turkish veins. 
 
 Germany and the Kaiser have showered their 
 richest honours on the bespectacled soldier who 
 looks more like a schoolmaster than a general. From 
 his rank of junior lieutenant in the Austrian cam¬ 
 paign of 1866, in which he had his left shoulder 
 smashed by shell fire, Goltz has risen to the dignity 
 of the ranking Field-Marshal of Prussia and a 
 Knight of the Black Eagle. He traces his ancestral 
 line to a Goltz who was ennobled and made a Mar¬ 
 shal of France by Louis XIV. A man of gentlest 
 exterior, he has a heart of oak and an iron will which 
 is respecter of neither rank, precedent nor tradition. 
 His speciality is stiff-neckedness to superiors and 
 kind-heartedness to subordinates. He cares nothing 
 whatever for the dress-parade atmosphere of his 
 caste. His military rank requires his presence at 
 Court on spectacular occasions of State, when one of 
 his privileges is to carry the Supreme War Lord’s 
 sword. He looks upon such a function more as a 
 bore than a prerogative, and refers to the decorative 
 216 
 
VON DER GOLTZ 
 
 figure one cuts on such occasions as that of an 
 oleander. 
 
 Germany’s new Army Bill, which is designed 
 primarily to strengthen her military independence, 
 interprets what Von der Goltz regards the basis of 
 all true schemes of national defence. He believes 
 the Fatherland must be armed for war on all 
 fronts. He does not think any country ought ever 
 to depend on anything but its own resources. It 
 would be fatuous to contend that Von der Goltz’ 
 professional star is as irresistibly in the ascendant 
 as it was before the Balkan War. It is not. 
 The myth of the invincibility of German training 
 has unquestionably received a staggering blow. But 
 it is a woefully misguided foreign General Staff 
 which imagines that Germany can be rolled up as 
 Turkey was. Armageddon, no matter on whose 
 banners victory eventually perches, will tell a 
 different story. 
 
XXVI 
 
 GERHART HAUPTMANN 
 
 A MONG the good wishes all Germany ex¬ 
 tended to Gerhart Hauptmann on his 
 fiftieth birthday in November, 1912, a hope 
 which found frequent and fervent expression was 
 that he would take a long rest before putting hand 
 to fresh literary effort. Nothing cynical or ironical 
 was father to the thought. In twenty-three years 
 Hauptmann had turned out exactly twenty-four 
 plays and novels. The last ten of them, covering 
 a period of as many years, were all failures. The 
 producer of The Weavers and The Sunken Bell 
 seemed to have lost his creative cunning. His ad¬ 
 mirers besought him to undergo a period of pro¬ 
 longed intellectual convalescence lest the decadence 
 into which they considered him to have fallen be¬ 
 came chronic. Many attribute his gluttony for 
 work, as well as the decay of his genius, to the semi- 
 luxurious life he has affected in recent years, and to 
 the commendable desire to finance it out of revenue. 
 By such diagnosticians of Hauptmann’s latter-day 
 powerlessness the bestowal of the Nobel Prize for 
 Literature on his fiftieth anniversary is looked 
 upon as almost providential. They cherish the hope 
 that he may now find it meet to slow down his 
 
 218 
 
GERHART HAUPTMANN 
 
 overworked mental machinery until he is able to 
 give again of his old-time self. His “Complete 
 Works”—poems, social plays, novels and tales — 
 were recently published in six stately volumes. His 
 wellwishers devoutly trust that it will be at least 
 a decade before another can be added to the 
 collection. 
 
 Hauptmann, despite the fact that his fame at the 
 moment is more stationary than in the ascendant, 
 is by almost universal consent the most gifted poet 
 and dramatist now writing in the German language. 
 Sudermann and Wedekind, and Schonherr, Schnitz- 
 ler and Bahr, the leaders of the Austrian School, all 
 have their worshippers, but the Silesian bard, the 
 revolutionary of the productive ’nineties, the real 
 Hauptmann, ranks as the most German, the noblest 
 of them all. Nothing has altered his compatriots’ 
 belief that the eras of German literature which 
 deserve to be recorded as epochs are still denoted by 
 Schiller, Goethe, Grillparzer, Hebbel and Haupt¬ 
 mann. We live in a material age, when literary 
 successes are appraised in terms of vogue. Measured 
 by that standard, Hauptmann stands high among 
 the “best sellers” of all countries. The Sunken 
 Bell has reached its eightieth German edition— 
 German editions sometimes run to two thousand or 
 three thousand copies; of translations in English, 
 French, Russian and Italian no figures are available. 
 The Weavers has gone to forty-three German 
 editions, and Hannele and Poor Henry have each 
 attained a twenty-third edition. 
 
 219 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 In an autobiographical sketch a few years ago, 
 Hauptmann, dwelling on the accusation that he was 
 not a playwright, replied: “If I have not the 
 qualities of the dramatist, I have at any rate his 
 weaknesses, and one of them is the inability to let 
 any single voice speak from the many-voicedness of 
 my spirit, even if the voice be my own! As it is 
 to-day, so it has always been. In the depth of my 
 being many voices have always clamoured for a 
 hearing, and I saw no other possibility of bringing 
 a semblance of order out of chaos except in the form 
 of verse and prose, which spoke many sentiments— 
 in other words, to write drama. I shall have to 
 continue doing this, as it has been my highest 
 spiritual form of life and expression of personality.’’ 
 
 The “many-voicedness” of Hauptmann’s soul 
 turned his early life into that of a rolling stone. He 
 was twenty-six before he found himself—a period 
 extraordinarily late in Germany, where youths 
 select their careers long before attaining manhood. 
 I have known Gymnasiasten of sixteen who spent 
 sleepless nights of indecision as to whether the 
 Church, the law or the State had prior claims on 
 their budding talents. Hauptmann tried his hand 
 at many things before the right one manifested 
 itself. Born in 1862, the son of an innkeeper at the 
 little Silesian watering-place of Salzbrunn, he was 
 notoriously backward in his lessons at the primary 
 schools, and his father sent him to Breslau, the 
 capital of the province, in the hope that a Gymna¬ 
 sium education would drag him out of his dreams 
 
 220 
 
GERHART HAUPTMANN 
 
 and make him study and learn like other boys. But 
 he seemed predestined to remain at the foot of his 
 classes, and left Gymnasium without passing into 
 the higher form. He was sickly besides, and 
 developed symptoms of y consumption. Then his 
 parents sent him to relatives who were farmers, 
 hoping that life in the open would put fresh air into 
 his lungs and ambition for a useful career into his 
 heart, but farming did not appeal to him, and he 
 soon wended his way back to Breslau, this time to 
 try his hand at sculpture in the local school of art. 
 He was a wilful pupil, who had often to be sus¬ 
 pended for insubordination, and in 1882, a stripling 
 of twenty, he left the institution, with failure again 
 written across his papers. 
 
 The zeal to write creatively was already burning 
 fiercely within young Hauptmann. He had per¬ 
 petrated considerable poetry of a highly idealistic 
 colour in his callowest youth, including drama in 
 blank-verse and an epic poem. Now, together with 
 his brother Karl, who was also to become a dram¬ 
 atist of some note, Hauptmann wandered to Jena, 
 where the brothers put in a desultory year dabbling 
 in philosophy and natural science at the feet of 
 Haeckel. Then the two companions in restlessness 
 went to Hamburg, where an elder brother was in 
 business, thence to wend their aimless way to Spain 
 and the Mediterranean, ending up with a visit to 
 Italy and a prolonged sojourn in Rome. Here Ger¬ 
 hart tarried alone, to dedicate himself once more to 
 sculpture. In 1885, now married, he moved to Ber- 
 
 221 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 lin, where intimate association with the stormy 
 petrels of the revolutionary era dawning in German 
 literature finally landed him in the sphere which 
 was at length to prove his long-sought natural 
 element. 
 
 In 1889, mainly under the inspiration of the path- 
 breaker, Arno Holz, Hauptmann blossomed forth 
 as the bright particular star of the new school of 
 literary thought, whose gods were Ibsen, Tolstoi 
 and Zola, and which was to pave the way for 
 realism and naturalism in German dramatic art, as 
 Richard Strauss and Max Liebermann were pre¬ 
 paring to do in music and painting. Hauptmann 
 became identified with “The Free Stage,” a society 
 founded by the literary Secessionists, and in Octo¬ 
 ber, 1889, under its auspices, his first serious the¬ 
 atrical work, Before Sunrise, saw the light of day. 
 A movingly terrible problem play dealing with social 
 conditions in the author’s own native Silesia, 
 Hauptmann’s relentless indictment of provincial 
 German life, with its sordid atmosphere of greed, 
 inebriety and licentiousness, was naturalism in the 
 n-th degree. “A picture of hell itself would have 
 paled by the side of it; Zola and Tolstoi would have 
 had to confess ‘He can do better than we,’ ” was 
 the comment of the novelist, Friedrich Spielhagen, 
 on witnessing Before Sunrise. The premiere at the 
 Lessing Theater was a veritable Donnybrook melee 
 between the stalwarts of the old school and 
 the revolutionaries. Heads were broken, faces 
 scratched, and much hair pulled, but a fresh era 
 
 222 
 
GERHART HAUPTMANN 
 
 in German dramatic production was irrevocably 
 inaugurated. 
 
 Four years later Hauptmann produced his great 
 labour epic, The Weavers , again under the auspices 
 of the Free Stage, but it was not until eighteen 
 months afterwards that the piece was released by the 
 Censor for public performance. The Weavers, a 
 frankly revolutionary tragedy of toil, created a 
 deserved sensation. It assaulted the ramparts of the 
 industrial system with sixteen-inch guns and 
 stamped Hauptmann for all time as a dramatist of 
 consummate power. His paternal grandfather was 
 a Silesian weaver in the ’forties, and the compelling 
 misery of the play founded on actual incidents in 
 the life of the author’s ancestor. The Weavers is 
 unquestionably Hauptmann at his best. Sentimen¬ 
 talists and chocolate-and-whipped-cream Backfische 
 prefer The Sunken Bell, with its mystic and roman¬ 
 tic symbolism, but in every line and scene of The 
 Weavers there is a vision of red blood and pulsating 
 life. If I were the head of the Socialist party, I 
 should produce The Weavers at the expense of the 
 Social Democratic war-chest every night in every 
 industrial centre in the land. There has never been 
 so soul-stirring an arraignment of the capitalistic 
 Moloch. 
 
 Hauptmann’s next offering, The Beaver Skin, 
 which he called a comedy of thievery, was a marked 
 departure from anything he had previously at¬ 
 tempted, and branded him a brilliant satirist. 
 Nominally a skit on the stealth and devilry of 
 
 223 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 designing womankind, The Beaver Skin was in 
 reality a screaming burlesque on the German bureau¬ 
 cratic system. The autocratic and snobbish provin¬ 
 cial administrator, to whom red-tape, circumlocution 
 and blind adherence to the letter of the law are holy 
 writ, was delightfully lampooned. Only a few weeks 
 after The Beaver Skin Hauptmann, executing as 
 lightning a change as he had accomplished in the 
 interval following The Weavers, revealed himself in 
 still another guise in Hannele, “a dream poem.” 
 Many consider this tragedy of a dying child’s 
 fantastic vision of her ascent to Heaven Haupt¬ 
 mann’s greatest creation. The German Emperor 
 hailed it as the authentic beginning of a genuine 
 modern Christian drama, a distinction the Kaiser 
 has since transferred to the Tyrolean Schonherr’s 
 Faith and Horne. 
 
 The Sunken Bell is Hauptmann’s deepest plunge 
 into romanticism. It set all Germany by the ears 
 after its production at the Deutsches Theater in 
 Berlin, in December, 1896. Controversy over its 
 merits raged furiously for months, and made the 
 play Hauptmann’s greatest success both at home 
 and abroad. The author’s detractors aver that it 
 was Josef Kainz, the young Viennese tragedian, 
 whose untimely death a year ago robbed the 
 German stage of its greatest luminary, who 
 “made” The Sunken Bell with his poetical inter¬ 
 pretation of the bell-caster. But the story of 
 Heinrich, the emotion-torn, and Rautendelein, his 
 Circe, is quaint and moving. Tens of thousands 
 
 224 
 
GERHART HAUPTMANN 
 
 who never saw Kainz’ Heinrich have been charmed 
 by the sublimity and beauty of the tale. A stanza, 
 which Hauptmann puts into the hero’s mouth 
 epitomises the psychology of the piece: “Open 
 the window! Let in Light and God!” 
 
 Hauptmann has written—emitted is, perhaps, the 
 better word—new works incessantly since his Bell, 
 but, with the single exception of Poor Henry, a 
 German legendary tragedy (1902), has done nothing 
 to amplify, or even sustain, his earlier fame. His 
 newest play, The Rats, a tragi-comedy of modern 
 Berlin, the same theme, strangely enough, to which 
 Hermann Sudermann has just dedicated himself in 
 A Good Reputation, was an utter failure two years 
 ago. Hauptmann’s very latest literary output, a 
 novel of the sea, “Atlantis,” his fiftieth birthday 
 offering to his admirers, scored only a moderate 
 success. 
 
 Hauptmann’s creed is set forth in this striking 
 introduction to his “Complete Works”:— 
 
 “All thinking is based on one’s special cast of 
 thought, one’s philosophic attitude towards the facts 
 of life. All thinking is moreover a kind of wrestling 
 between opponent thoughts, and therefore dramatic. 
 Every philosopher who puts before us a system of 
 logical syntheses has built it up out of decisions 
 which he has arrived at after listening to this com¬ 
 bat of opinions argued out at the bar of his own 
 soul. Thus it is that I consider the drama to be the 
 expression of original thinking, thinking at a high 
 stage of development. But the dramatist is concerned 
 
 225 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 with decisions other than those which the philoso¬ 
 pher specially aims at. From this special way of 
 looking at the universe of life, then, are born whole 
 series of deductions whereby the sphere of the 
 drama, as compared with that of the dramaturgies 
 now in vogue, is infinitely widened. Nothing, there¬ 
 fore, that presents itself either to the external or the 
 inward senses can be excluded from this thought- 
 form, which transmutes itself into an art-form.” 
 
 Hauptmann does not look unlike Goethe. He is 
 a tall, stately figure of a man, smooth-shaven, high- 
 browed and broad-shouldered, with the same head 
 of bristling, upstanding hair which adorned the 
 creator of Faust. His favourite gesture in conver¬ 
 sation is to run his fingers nervously through his 
 fast-silvering locks. Like Goethe, too, Hauptmann 
 complains that he is sorely misunderstood by his 
 contemporaries. His most striking physical charac¬ 
 teristic is the penetrating brightness of his piercing 
 blue German eyes. He looks one squarely in the 
 face when speaking, talks slowly and distinctly, and 
 plainly weighs every word before uttering it. His 
 features are exceptionally mobile and expressive. 
 Occasionally a far-way look steals into his face, 
 and you imagine him in one of the reveries from 
 which The Sunken Bell must have sprung. 
 
 Hauptmann is something of an egoist, and many 
 think him arrogant. People say, for example, he 
 has never given adequate credit to his great patron, 
 the late Otto Brahm, of the Lessing Theater, who 
 practically “made” Hauptmann as a dramatist, and, 
 
 226 
 
GERHART HAUPTMANN 
 
 in a spirit of devoted self-sacrifice unusual in this 
 box-office age, forced Hauptmann plays on the the¬ 
 atre-going public year after year, notwithstanding 
 that they frequently were performed to empty 
 houses. Salzbrunn, Hauptmann’s birthplace, osten¬ 
 tatiously declined to honour its most famous son 
 on his fiftieth birthday, claiming the author had been 
 too much consumed with self ever to waste time 
 or thought on his native town. The gravest charge 
 levelled against Hauptmann is that he has been 
 treasonable to the ideals which first gave him re¬ 
 nown. When he went to Stockholm to receive the 
 Nobel Prize, he pleaded eloquently against the 
 accusation that Socialistic blood once flowed in 
 his veins. One is told nowadays that the man who 
 wrote The Weavers has become a poet-prince who 
 is enamoured of the dolce far niente of luxurious 
 living in a palatial country house and an Italian 
 villa. His detractors, an army corps in size, de¬ 
 clare he has forgotten that he was once the bard of 
 toil, and has become the poet of high finance. 
 Hauptmann has had a somewhat unconventional 
 matrimonial history. You will hear that Rauten- 
 delein of The Sunken Bell was not wholly an imagi¬ 
 nary creature. But friend and foe alike agree that 
 what Hauptmann needs most is a rest, if he is to 
 augment his fame by fresh creations. Perhaps the 
 Prussian Centenary drama he has written for pro¬ 
 duction in his native province this summer — a sym¬ 
 bolical epic of war, revolution and peace-—-will 
 again permit him to come forth laurel-crowned. 
 
XXVII 
 
 PRINCE LICHNOWSKY 
 
 P EACE or war with England is the Father¬ 
 land’s question of questions. Treitschke 
 adjured his countrymen that, having settled 
 their scores with Denmark, Austria and France, the 
 Germans’ reckoning with Great Britain would be 
 the last and the greatest. To-day its inevitability is 
 circumstantially heralded by a lesser Treitschke, 
 General von Bernhardi, whose trenchant “Germany’s 
 Next War” has been compressed into a popular 
 edition, in order that even the man in the street may 
 be taught to anticipate history intelligently. A clash 
 with England is Kismet to immense sections of the 
 German people. 
 
 There are millions of Germans who disavow the 
 thought of war with Britain as a hideous and 
 unthinkable crime against civilisation. They are 
 to be found, unfortunately, not among the ruling 
 caste, but mainly among the commercial and 
 industrial fraternity, which is more interested in 
 business than battle, and looks upon anything 
 designed to arrest Germany’s vast economic prog¬ 
 ress as felonious and reprehensible. But they 
 constitute a chorus in the wilderness. If their 
 
 228 
 
PRINCE LICHNOWSKY 
 
 voices could prevail, the menace of an Anglo- 
 German conflict might be relegated to oblivion for 
 all time. 
 
 Amid conditions such as these, it may be accounted 
 an asset for the world’s peace that Germany is 
 represented in London by a diplomat of common- 
 sense and clear-headedness, Prince Karl Maximilian 
 Lichnowsky, appointed Ambassador in October, 
 1912, to succeed the late Baron Marschall. Prince 
 Lichnowsky has not had time to demonstrate his 
 agility in treading “the steep and stony path,” but 
 he has made a good beginning. He is burdened with 
 no fatuous illusions concerning the imponderabilia 
 of the situation. He knows that a rapprochement 
 cannot be built up on intellectual sympathies or 
 considerations of sentiment. He recognises that 
 naval rivalry is the paramount issue. He realises 
 that until it is adjusted, settled or reconciled, Anglo- 
 German relations can never rest on a foundation 
 of permanent security or genuine trust. He admits 
 that the problem bristles with difficulties, both 
 of a political and technical nature, but he is 
 optimist enough to consider its solution within the 
 realm of possibilities. He admits Great Britain’s 
 necessity to be supreme at sea, and contends 
 that those of his countrymen who dispute it are 
 an uninfluential minority. Prince Lichnowsky has 
 not always been as sound or open-minded on naval 
 politics as he is to-day. As recently as four years 
 ago he cherished a strangely myopic conception 
 of the underlying motives of Britain’s demand 
 
 229 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 for sovereignty of the sea. Writing in October, 1909, 
 in the Deutsche Revue, he advanced the following 
 theories:— 
 
 “British antagonism to Germany is primarily 
 the artificial creation of British statesmen, who 
 require a bogey to awaken modern England from 
 the decadence so vividly described by Oscar Wilde 
 and Bernard Shaw. 
 
 “It was realised by British statesmen that the 
 conversion of the United Kingdom into a Capitalist 
 State had brought certain evils in its train. The 
 Puritan spirit that founded the British Empire had 
 vanished. Its economic power, like the fecundity of 
 British mothers, was on the wane. Statesmen were 
 compelled, therefore, to devise some means of arous¬ 
 ing the nation to a new effort. 
 
 “Knowing that fear was the best weapon with 
 which to achieve this end, they seized upon Germany 
 both as an example and a scarecrow. They ex¬ 
 ploited it for Imperial defence and colonial federa¬ 
 tion and fiscal policy. 
 
 “As the supremacy of the fleet had long been the 
 great British tradition, the naval authorities did 
 not hesitate to misuse the German fleet for the 
 furtherance of their own political fortunes. They 
 would be loth to declare war and destroy the 
 German fleet and commerce, because they would 
 thereby annihilate the bogeys with whose aid they 
 were chiefly enabled to perpetuate their existence 
 and popularise Imperial schemes.” 
 
 By the summer of 1912 a new light had dawned 
 230 
 
PRINCE LICHNOWSKY 
 
 on Prince Lichnowsky. Writing in Professor 
 Stein’s Nord mid Siid, he said :— 
 
 “It is Great Britain’s right to possess a mighty 
 fleet. Our duty on the other hand is not to be 
 defenceless. It must give us cause to think when we 
 find Great Britain always against us. We have to 
 realise that Great Britain, which sees in us her most 
 important, and, therefore, her most dangerous rival, 
 is as little likely to take our side in the future as she 
 did over Morocco. Great Britain will regard a 
 German fleet strong enough to render us independent 
 as a national danger. We build a fleet in order not 
 to fall into a position of dependence. At all events, 
 a more friendly attitude in British policy towards us 
 must precede any limitation of our armaments, 
 which sprang from the effects of British policy on 
 the public mind in Germany. A solution lies in a 
 compromise restricting Anglo-German competition 
 to the paths of peaceful industry and moderate 
 armaments, which would give Great Britain, as 
 champion of the world, an opportunity to match 
 herself in peace against a partner worthy of respect. 
 After we have copied her manners, sports, and 
 games, Great Britain should not take it amiss that 
 we copy her fleet.” 
 
 Prince Lichnowsky’s ideal of the feasible in 
 Anglo-German relations is an entente cordiale based 
 on “mutual confidence and common aims,” a modus 
 vivendi which, while excluding war, would avoid the 
 sacrifice of vital interests and safeguard national 
 honour. He has so far kept clear of the thin ice 
 
 231 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 of the Navy question. None of his several public 
 utterances in London has touched it. To 
 Mr. Churchill’s latest proposal for naval peace—a 
 “holiday year” in shipbuilding—the German 
 Government turned a deaf ear, as it has done on all 
 other similar occasions in the past. If the British 
 Government is ever constrained to make a formal 
 tender of a naval understanding to Berlin, it will 
 undoubtedly become Prince Lichnowsky’s painful 
 duty to trudge across St. James’s Park to Downing 
 Street with the message that Germany looks upon 
 the project as Utopian and undebatable. Not that 
 he himself is a zealot of the Navy League rpould. 
 He is, indeed, on record as saying that a “slowing 
 down in the rate of construction,” along lines 
 repeatedly broached from the British side of the 
 North Sea, “is the only attainable thing.” But 
 Germany’s naval policy is made in Leipziger Platz, 
 not Carlton House Terrace. 
 
 Like his compatriot and confrere at Washington, 
 Count Bernstorff, Prince Lichnowsky is essentially 
 a diplomat of modern method and point of 
 view. The German Embassy at London, under his 
 predecessors, Prince Hatzfeldt and Count Wolff- 
 Metternich, was almost a hermitage. For years it 
 was socially non-existent. Count Metternich, 
 ambassador during the strained decade following 
 the South African War, was a bachelor who ab¬ 
 horred the role of either host or guest. He lacked 
 social qualities almost utterly. Many students of the 
 psychology of Anglo-German tension ascribe it to 
 
 232 
 
PRINCE LICHNOWSKY 
 
 the fact that the wire between the German Embassy 
 in London and the great thought-moulding circles 
 of British life and society has long been out of work¬ 
 ing order. Prince Lichnowsky, finding the wires 
 down, proceeded to put them up. Forthwith he set 
 himself the task of moving about and of seeing and 
 knowing people. Public opinion rules in England, 
 and he conceived it his business to keep in touch 
 with those who make it. He accepted invitations 
 to address public dinners of the Royal Society, the 
 Lord Mayor and the Chambers of Commerce, and 
 embraced the opportunity of the Kaiser’s birthday 
 dinner of the German “colony” in London to dis¬ 
 cuss his mission and the ambitions he cherished for 
 it. Supported by a particularly brilliant consort, the 
 Princess Mechthilde Lichnowsky, nee Countess Arco 
 von und zu Zinneberg, he caused it to be known that 
 the all-important social phase of diplomatic life was 
 to him a thoroughly congenial obligation, and that he 
 purposed living up to it. He is tremendously fond 
 of sport and hunting, and lost no time in letting 
 Englishmen know that in him they had a kindred 
 spirit. It was no insignificant tribute to the 
 security and rapidity with which Prince and 
 Princess Lichnowsky won their spurs in exclusive 
 London that they were honoured, within four 
 months of their arrival, with the presence of the 
 King and Queen at their dinner-table. 
 
 Into Prince Lichnowsky’s half-year in England 
 has been crowded more diplomatic experience of the 
 first magnitude than in all his previous career. 
 
 233 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 Britain’s leadership of the Concert of Europe in the 
 liquidation of Turkey gave responsible opportunities 
 to Ambassadors accredited to the Court of St. 
 James. That England and Germany found it pos¬ 
 sible throughout the tortuous progress of the Balkan 
 settlement to co-operate under truly intimate and 
 confidential conditions proved that the Kaiser is 
 represented in London by an Ambassador of dis¬ 
 tinguished capacity. It is hardly mere chance that 
 at least an external improvement in the highly- 
 charged Anglo-German atmosphere has ensued dur¬ 
 ing Prince Lichnowsky’s brief residence in England. 
 
 The Prince is fifty-three years old, and is the head 
 of a Silesian family of ancient aristocratic lineage, 
 with large estates at Kuchelna and Gratz. His 
 mother was a Princess of Croy. The son of a 
 Prussian General of Cavalry, he himself began life 
 as a soldier, and was a brother-officer of the present 
 Kaiser in the Life Guard Hussars. William II. 
 has always taken a lively interest in the careers of 
 men who were with him at the University and in 
 the Army. The former Red Hussar of Potsdam, 
 whose military rank is that of a major, claims a 
 particularly warm place in the affection of his 
 ex-colonel whom he now represents in England. 
 The Emperor, recognising the exceeding good 
 birth of the Lichnowskys, frequently addresses 
 the Prince with the appellation of equality, du. 
 During “Chancellor crises” Prince Lichnowsky 
 is always mentioned as a logical possibility for 
 the Premiership. He was a boon friend of Prince 
 
 234 
 
PRINCE LICHNOWSKY 
 
 Biilow and, contrary to the example of others, 
 remained loyal to the fallen Chancellor after the 
 latter’s totter from grace. Prince Lichnowsky, 
 strangely enough, began his diplomatic career as an 
 attache in London twenty-eight years ago. When 
 he was appointed Ambassador, he said he felt, in 
 returning to England, like a man going back home. 
 After serving in London the Prince was stationed 
 successively at Stockholm, Constantinople, Dresden, 
 Bucharest and Vienna, and then became a depart¬ 
 ment-chief at the Foreign Office in Berlin, where he 
 remained with the rank of a Minister Plenipotentiary 
 until his retirement in 1904. The eight years’ inter¬ 
 val of his diplomatic inactivity was employed mainly 
 in superintending the extensive properties inherited 
 from his father, though he found time to participate 
 in domestic politics as a hereditary member of the 
 Prussian Upper House. 
 
 Although a Roman Catholic, Prince Lichnowsky 
 has never identified himself with the Clerical Centre 
 Party or its ultramontane politics. Nominally 
 a Conservative, he revealed distinct traces of 
 Liberalism during the bitter controversy over 
 Prussian Franchise Reform in 1910. In vigorous 
 speeches in the Herrenhaus he put himself on 
 record in favour of a sane revision of the Suffrage 
 system, declaring that “the necessity to make 
 timely concessions to the Democracy is imperative 
 and can no longer be avoided.” He declined to 
 be associated with any reform which did not accede 
 to justifiable demands for more truly popular 
 
 235 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 government in Prussia. Perhaps Prince Lich- 
 nowsky’s insistence on the rights of the proletariat 
 sprang from recollections of the terrible fate of his 
 paternal uncle, Prince Felix Lichnowsky, who was 
 foully lynched by the Democratic mob outside 
 Frankfort in the frenzied days of the Revolution 
 of 1848. 
 
 Unprepossessing of exterior, with a head of 
 somewhat pentagonal mould and a stooping figure, 
 Prince Lichnowsky looks the Polish aristocrat of 
 another generation, with all the distingue of the 
 Grand Seigneur of that type. He has a strongly 
 accentuated artistic nature. His knowledge of the 
 English language is faultless. He sometimes con¬ 
 veys the impression of loquacity, but can be enig¬ 
 matic and phlegmatic when it is useful. His 
 wife, who is predestined to make a deep impress 
 on London society, is, like her husband, a clever 
 writer. Only recently she has published a charming 
 book, “The Land of the Pharaohs,’’ dealing vividly 
 with impressions of trips through Egypt. 
 
 With their wealth, bonhomie, personal prestige, 
 predilections for the best things in English life, 
 and natural social gifts, Prince and Princess Lich¬ 
 nowsky fit ideally into the charmed circle of London 
 diplomacy. Neither of them is likely to fall a 
 victim of its seductive pitfalls. 
 
XXVIII 
 
 VON KIDERLEN-WAECHTER 
 
 I T was a tragic coincidence which willed that 
 the collapse of Turkey, where Germany’s 
 politico-economic interests have of recent 
 years been so assiduously cultivated, should syn¬ 
 chronise with the almost simultaneous deaths of 
 Germany’s greatest specialists on Near Eastern 
 affairs—Baron Marschall von Bieberstein and Herr 
 von Kiderlen-Waechter. Without sinning on the 
 side of triteness it can be asserted that their loss 
 was almost irreparable. At the psychological 
 moment of their departure, when the incalculable 
 possibilities of the Balkan War monopolised 
 Europe’s attention, it was as if the German polit¬ 
 ical army had lost its entire Intelligence Department 
 at one blow. 
 
 Kiderlen—the hyphenated name of the late 
 Foreign Secretary was seldom used—had been in 
 charge of the Auswartiges Amt only two years and 
 a half when stricken down in the early hours of 
 1913 ; but he had been a positive factor in Germany’s 
 foreign affairs for a generation. In the first two 
 great European crises of the present century—the 
 Bosnian annexation of 1909, and the Morocco 
 imbroglio of 1911—the bluff, rotund Wurtemberger, 
 whose diplomatic schoolmaster was Bismarck, 
 
 237 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 played the leading role. From the Bosnian incident 
 he emerged triumphant. Morocco added no lustre 
 to his fame, but he survived it brilliantly, and his 
 star was steadily, even rapidly, in the ascendant 
 when his end came. Rapprochement with England 
 was the ideal to which his ebbing energies were 
 being devoted. He did not believe that Anglo- 
 German rivalries must end in Armageddon. “The 
 English,” he said to a friend, only a few weeks be¬ 
 fore his death, “are much too shrewd business peo¬ 
 ple not to realise, finally, that neither they nor we 
 can profit from the present state of affairs. You 
 may be sure an understanding will come no matter 
 who is Ambassador in London!” Kiderlen’s last 
 public utterance was a brief, but telling, statement 
 in the Reichstag recording the “gratifying intimacy” 
 which had sprung up between the British and 
 German Governments in connection with the Balkan 
 turmoil. 
 
 When Herr von Kiderlen was summoned to the 
 German Foreign Office in the summer of 1910, his 
 advent on the scene of contemporary diplomacy 
 was hailed as the arrival of “a new force in Europe.” 
 Here and there he was welcomed as “the new 
 Bismarck.” He had, and deserved, a reputation 
 for ruthless directness of method which is popularly 
 associated with the Iron Chancellor. That Kiderlen 
 was to prove at least a disturbing force, events of 
 the succeeding summer were to show; for the 
 Moroccan adventure was primarily, if not exclu¬ 
 sively, of his making. He did not come out of it 
 
 238 
 
VON KIDERLE N-W A E C H T E R 
 
 with his diplomatic reputation enhanced; but that 
 he remained as Foreign Secretary after detractors 
 ha.' composed his political obituary a dozen times 
 is, perhaps, the highest tribute which could be paid 
 to his skill. The Kaiser is not accustomed to 
 tolerate failures in exposed positions. Kiderlen’s 
 power and influence grew to be immeasurably 
 higher after Agadir than they were before. 
 
 Kiderlen became a truly national figure in Ger¬ 
 many under circumstances designed to ruin the 
 career of a merely average politician or diplomat. 
 Germany was still in the tumult of the “Kaiser 
 crisis” of November, 1908, when a fat and florid 
 man in a lurid yellow waistcoat rose from the' 
 Government bench in the Reichstag. He was the 
 unrecognised spokesman of the Foreign Office. It 
 fell to his thankless lot to defend the Department 
 against scathing attack from a dozen quarters. 
 “The Foreign Office,” he began, “is hopelessly 
 understaffed. We are handling four times as 
 many documents as ever before in our history. I 
 will match our zealous personnel against that of 
 any Foreign Office in the world.” This circum¬ 
 locutory defence of the Department against crass 
 incompetency caused the House to rock with 
 ironical delight. The Acting Foreign Secretary, 
 Herr von Kiderlen-Waechter, got no further. 
 The remainder of his “speech” was drowned in a 
 Niagara of hilarity. The “man with the yellow 
 waistcoat”—so was he destined henceforth to be 
 known—ignominiously resumed his seat, com- 
 
 239 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 pletely laughed down. Few knew him, but who¬ 
 ever he was, his career was considered closed. 
 
 But people erred grievously in judging Kiderlen 
 from his absurd maiden effort in the Reichstag. 
 Summoned to serve as Foreign Secretary tempo¬ 
 rarily while the “Kaiser crisis” was raging, he was 
 thrown into the breach at a psychological moment, 
 for a few months later the Bosnian annexation 
 plunged the Austrian-German alliance into the cru¬ 
 cial test of its career. Events proved Kiderlen to 
 be the man of the hour. With ten years of experi¬ 
 ence at the important diplomatic outpost of Bucha¬ 
 rest at his back, and intermittent periods of deputis¬ 
 ing for Baron Marschall at Constantinople, Kiderlen 
 had become an expert on the tortuous affairs of 
 the Near East. In the spring of 1909, when Aus¬ 
 tria-Hungary and Germany dared Europe say them 
 nay in the destruction of the Treaty of Berlin, it 
 was Kiderlen, still acting as Foreign Secretary, 
 who held the reins of German diplomacy and 
 directed the policy which coerced Russia into sullen 
 recognition of the Bosnian annexation under penalty 
 of war. The Kaiser donned his “shining armour” 
 on that historic occasion at the instigation of Kider¬ 
 len. Count Aehrenthal and Prince Biilow reaped 
 the public laurels of the ominous triumph of Ger¬ 
 man diplomacy. To Kiderlen belongs the actual 
 credit. 
 
 Elaving snapped his fingers in the face of the 
 Franco-Russian Alliance, it was not surprising that 
 Kiderlen should pick out the Anglo-French Entente 
 
 240 
 
VON KIDERLEN-WAECHTER 
 
 Cordiale as his next object of assault. The French 
 advance on Fez gave him the pretext, and in July, 
 1911, the Kaiser’s gunboat “Panther” dropped 
 anchor at Agadir. The history of that ill-starred 
 expedition is fresh in the public mind. The 
 “Panther” executed its dramatic spring on the 
 Moroccan coast, kept Europe on tenterhooks for 
 more than three months, and then ingloriously 
 withdrew. The Entente Cordiale proved more 
 impregnable than “the new Bismarck” had calcu¬ 
 lated. France remained in Morocco at the cost 
 of “compensations” to Germany, which have turned 
 out to be worth, in popular estimation, hardly the 
 coal the “Panther” burned during her stay at 
 Agadir. 
 
 After serving through the Franco-Prussian War 
 as a volunteer, Herr von Ividerlen-Waechter entered 
 the diplomatic service during the heyday of the 
 Bismarck regime, when the influence of that strange 
 unseen autocrat of German foreign policy, the late 
 Herr von Holstein, was paramount. Between 
 Von Holstein, Prince Philip zu Eulenburg and 
 Kiderlen an intimate friendship existed. Kiderlen, 
 at the time, was merely head of a sub-division at 
 the Foreign Office, but his comradeship with Hol¬ 
 stein and Eulenburg clothed him with unusual in¬ 
 fluence and authority. Kladderadatsch, the comic 
 weekly, regularly lampooned the trio of friends. It 
 dubbed Von Holstein “The Oyster Friend,” Eulen¬ 
 burg “The Troubadour,” and saddled Kiderlen with 
 the nickname of “Spatzle” (Dumpling) in token 
 
 241 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 of his fondness for that succulent South German 
 dainty. In 1894, Kiderlen, incensed at some par¬ 
 ticularly bold thrust in Kladderadatsch, challenged 
 its editor, Herr Polstorff, to a duel, and left him on 
 the field of honour with a bullet wound in the right 
 shoulder. 
 
 Kiderlen’s early diplomatic career was spent as 
 secretary or attache at German embassies and lega¬ 
 tions in St. Petersburg, Paris and Constantinople. 
 In 1888 he was delegated to represent the Foreign 
 Office on State visits which William II. paid to the 
 Courts of Russia, Sweden and Denmark, following 
 his accession. He was destined to ingratiate himself 
 with the Kaiser, who was immensely fond of the 
 young diplomat’s unconventional style and talents 
 as a raconteur. It was these very traits, however, 
 which were to bring Kiderlen into disrepute with 
 his Sovereign. At a Cowes regatta a few years 
 later, when he was again in his Majesty’s entourage, 
 he ventured to express some advanced opinions on 
 the Kaiser’s procedure while in British waters, and 
 the next batch of diplomatic changes gazetted by 
 the Foreign Office contained the announcement 
 of Kiderlen’s “banishment” to the legation in 
 Roumania. There he bided his time patiently and 
 effectively till his Imperial master made requisition 
 for his expert services at Berlin. 
 
 Kiderlen’s opportunity came with the appoint¬ 
 ment to the Chancellorship of Bethmann Hollweg, 
 whose ignorance of foreign affairs was profound. 
 Hitherto, German Foreign Secretaries had hardly 
 
 242 
 
VON KIDERLEN-WAECHTER 
 
 been more than amanuenses to Chancellors. 
 Kiderlen was the first to relegate that tradition. 
 He became Foreign Minister in something more 
 than name. Members of the Berlin Corps Diplo¬ 
 matique soon found that they had an individuality 
 to deal with, and not always an agreeable one, for 
 Kiderlen’s dominant characteristics were brusque¬ 
 ness of manner and disregard of the Chesterfieldian 
 proprieties which smooth the thorniest of diplo¬ 
 matic paths. He was rough at times to the point 
 of uncouthness, though his wit and joviality usually 
 saved the situation; but he could be suave and 
 conciliatory when occasion demanded, and M. 
 Cambon, the distinguished French ambassador at 
 Berlin, with whom the Moroccan duel was fought, 
 found his German adversary, despite his aggressive¬ 
 ness and tenacity of purpose, at heart a sane patriot 
 and honest antagonist. 
 
 The summer of 1911 was torrid in Berlin, 
 atmospherically and politically, and the diplo¬ 
 matic barometer, which was chiefly in the keep¬ 
 ing of Cambon and Kiderlen, more than once 
 sank in response to some saving act or word, 
 tactful or jovial, from the good-natured Wurtem- 
 berger who, for the time being, held German 
 destinies in the palm of his hand. A confirmed 
 bachelor, Kiderlen was an incessant smoker of 
 sturdy cigars, and his hobby was the keeping of 
 owls. He was prodigiously industrious and pre¬ 
 ferred work to social activity. He put in his spare 
 time, while Foreign Secretary, learning French, 
 
 243 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 which he grew to command. English was beyond 
 his powers. He was credited with the ambition to 
 succeed Baron Marschall at Constantinople, and 
 when that field of usefulness was closed to him, 
 he dedicated himself with all his iron energy to 
 the giant task of bettering Anglo-German relations. 
 Still virile and ambitious at sixty, he had but entered 
 on the best years of a busy life when gathered to 
 his fathers in the holidays of 1912—13. 
 
XXIX 
 
 PAUL EHRLICH 
 
 G ERMANY believes in honouring her great 
 sons while they are still alive. That is one 
 of the reasons why one has to drive 
 through “Paul Ehrlichstrasse” in Frank fort-on-the- 
 Main to reach the Royal Institute for Experimental 
 Therapeutics, where the discoverer of “606” has 
 his workshop. His great contemporary, Professor 
 Behring, discoverer of the diphtheria anti-toxin, has 
 been similarly distinguished by the placing of his 
 statue on one of the bridges spanning the Spree in 
 Berlin. The world at large knows Professor Ehrlich 
 best through the syphilis specific which he discovered 
 in 1909, but before that he had already accomplished 
 immensely important results in the science of 
 immunity and the treatment of sleeping sickness. 
 The Kaiser decorated him in 1903 with the Prussian 
 gold medal for science. Oxford, Gottingen and 
 Chicago, a couple of years later, awarded him 
 honorary degrees for eminent attainments. 
 
 Ehrlich’s latest discovery was named “606,” 
 because it was the six hundred and sixth atoxyl 
 derivative with which he experimented before reach¬ 
 ing his goal. In the mystifying lingo of the labora- 
 
 245 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 tory, the drug is called dioxydiamido-arsenobenzol. 
 In commerce the remedy is known as Salvarsan. 
 The present status of “606” is hard to define. The 
 medical universe is not united in its view of the real 
 value of the drug. Many physicians swear by it; 
 others swear at it. Before announcing its discovery, 
 Ehrlich accumulated records of ten thousand cases, 
 all of which, except a minor percentage, were 
 definitely cured within a miraculously quick period. 
 He attributed the few failures to the fact that he 
 could not at first be sure how large a dose could be 
 safely administered to a human being. “606” is not 
 the cure-all hailed so rapturously by the suffering 
 section of an ignorant public four years ago, but it 
 is admittedly a remarkable specific, and invaluable 
 in the treatment of the malady at which it is aimed. 
 It is undeniably efficacious. Whether it cures 
 permanently can only be determined by years of 
 minute observation. Argument over its merits or 
 demerits has grown materially less acrimonious. 
 It is now an accepted drug. Ehrlich himself 
 recognizes its imperfections. At least a third of his 
 time is devoted to probing and eradicating them. 
 Cancer and sleeping sickness are the other subjects 
 on which he is concentrating. 
 
 Claude Bernard, Helmholtz, Pasteur and Ehrlich 
 have been bracketed by an eminent authority as 
 “the unexcelled prototypes of investigators of life 
 phenomena in medicine.” Ehrlich stands out from 
 the rest mainly by reason of his imagination and 
 idealism. A foreign admirer has spoken of “the 
 
 246 
 
PAUL EHRLICH 
 
 uniquely fertile and versatile career of research” 
 which has made Ehrlich “the most original and 
 picturesque of living investigators of medical 
 science.” Though Ehrlich’s discoveries compre¬ 
 hend such divergent branches as chemistry, bacteriol¬ 
 ogy, neurology, histology, internal medicine, pathol¬ 
 ogy, pharmacology, studies of the protozoa and 
 immunity, his life-work, according to his biog¬ 
 rapher, Mrs. Marguerite Marks, “presents a logical 
 sequence.” 
 
 Writing in McClure’s Magazine for December, 
 1910, Mrs. Marks, whose husband was an assistant 
 in Ehrlich’s laboratory, gives an authoritative 
 account of the latter’s “basic idea.” “Briefly,” she 
 says, “it is this: that each and every type of living 
 cell, including bacteria and other parasites, has a 
 specific affinity—an individual taste or avidity—for 
 some particular substance. A given drug, when 
 taken into the body, is not equally distributed 
 throughout the body, nor does it equally affect 
 the different tissues and organs. Thus, morphine 
 and strychnine affect the nervous system, digitalis 
 acts on the heart, etc. Stated thus, in general 
 terms, the theory that each tissue has a selected 
 affinity for certain drugs is a commonplace of 
 medical knowledge. But Ehrlich elaborated the 
 theory till it took on new meanings. By experi¬ 
 menting along the line of his theory, he has been 
 able, in at least two instances, to discover drugs that 
 will destroy certain virulent disease germs in the 
 human system without injuring the body tissues 
 
 247 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 in the midst of which the germs lurk. Ehrlich has 
 thus forecast the probably not distant day when a 
 specific and certain remedy for every germ disease 
 to which humanity is heir will be at the service of 
 the medical profession.” 
 
 Ehrlich’s work as a young scientist attracted the 
 attention of Professor Robert Koch, who made a 
 place for him in the Koch Institute in Berlin in 
 1890. For twelve years previous Ehrlich had been 
 laying the foundations of his career as a humble 
 clinical assistant in the laboratories of various 
 noted scientists. His first achievement to attract 
 world-wide attention was that which extended 
 medical knowledge of the cellular elements of blood. 
 In the past science had confined itself to studying 
 fresh blood with a microscope. Quite by accident, 
 Ehrlich found that dried smears of blood, stained 
 with many different kinds of dyestuffs, concealed 
 secrets hitherto undreamt of. As a result of long¬ 
 time experimentation with the phenomenon across 
 which he had simply stumbled, Ehrlich arrived at a 
 staining solution, still known as the “Ehrlich 
 tri-acid stain,” which permits the differentiation of 
 normal white blood corpuscles into five distinct 
 varieties. The now familiar “blood tests,” enabling 
 instantaneous detection and diagnosis of different 
 diseases, were largely revolutionized by Ehrlich’s 
 discoveries. Later he determined an exact method 
 of distinguishing tubercle bacilli from the other 
 bacteria with which they are commonly associated. 
 
 Ehrlich next turned his restless and imaginative 
 248 
 
PAUL EPIRLICH 
 
 mind to the subject of immunity. What he was 
 looking for was a sound hypothesis which could 
 explain the commonplace knowledge that a person 
 who has survived infectious diseases like scarlet 
 fever, small-pox or measles, is seldom re-attacked. 
 His discoveries, based as always on extended and 
 patient experimental work, which was chiefly 
 distinguished for merciless disappointments, were 
 finally triumphant and laid the foundation for the 
 practical technique of immunization. Ehrlich also 
 demonstrated that immunity was transferable. 
 Behring’s new diphtheria anti-toxin was at this 
 time coming into general use, and Ehrlich set to 
 work to devise a standard which would guarantee 
 the production of non-deleterious serum. Again 
 his labours were rewarded, and he devised a standard 
 which the German Government, and in its wake all 
 other governments, presently adopted. In recogni¬ 
 tion of his services in standardizing anti-toxins, the 
 State of Prussia placed Ehrlich at the head of a 
 Government institute at Steglitz, near Berlin, 
 founded specially for the purpose of exhaustive 
 research in the anti-toxin field. Both Ehrlich and 
 the field rapidly outgrew the ramifications of the 
 Steglitz establishment, and he was appointed to 
 take charge of the more capacious and newly- 
 founded Royal Institute for Experimental Thera¬ 
 peutics at Frankfort. Though Ehrlich long ago 
 diverted his personal attention from the anti-toxin 
 branch, serum examination remains the Institute’s 
 principal speciality. 
 
 249 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 Sleeping sickness, the scourge which has devastated 
 sections of British Africa at the rate of one hundred 
 thousand victims within three years, was the next 
 theme to fascinate Ehrlich’s attention. He devoted 
 himself to a series of trials which included the in¬ 
 oculation of animals with hundreds of different dye¬ 
 stuffs, in order to ascertain which one of them, 
 combined with arsenic, was the most efficacious. 
 By dint of endless experiments he finally found one 
 —the 418th—which proved to be a specific for 
 sleeping sickness. He called it arseno-phenyl-glycin. 
 One injection cures all animals, even those which 
 seem to be dying. Arseno-phenyl-glycin is the 
 remedy now being administered to sleeping sickness 
 victims in Africa. It must be used with extreme 
 caution, and time will be required to demonstrate its 
 merits. Early results in places like Togo were highly 
 promising. It appears that two comparatively light 
 injections have effected definite cures, though the 
 disease prevalent in Togo is more amenable to treat¬ 
 ment than the scourge raging in Central Africa. In 
 the Philippines surra, a horse disease, has been suc¬ 
 cessfully combated with Ehrlich’s sleeping sickness 
 antidote. 
 
 A cancer cure, that gleaming goal on which the 
 medical minds of all the decades have been concen¬ 
 trated, has long engaged Ehrlich’s thought. He is 
 too conservative to prognosticate that he has even 
 approached it, but he has observed important 
 phenomena which have advanced current investiga¬ 
 tion substantially. He is confident science will 
 
 250 
 
PAUL EHRLICH 
 
 eventually triumph over cancer, though not soon, 
 and he is convinced that the solution lies along 
 the road of tireless experiments on animals. At 
 present he is treading that path, part of the time 
 in conjunction with a now famous pupil, Professor 
 von Wassermann of Berlin, who has attained 
 notable way-station results. 
 
 Ehrlich’s career is an inspiring confirmation of 
 the theory that study at university is a waste of 
 time. At Heidelberg, they say, nobody ever studies. 
 Paul Ehrlich sojourned at the universities of 
 Breslau, Strassburg, Freiburg and Leipzig, but it 
 is not on record that he concerned himself unduly 
 with the pearls of wisdom cast before him by his 
 professors. He “cut” more lectures than he 
 attended. Original work seemed immensely more 
 fruitful to him. He never “studied” chemistry. 
 He has always relied on what he calls his most 
 powerful asset, “a chemical imagination.” He 
 gives full rein to his fantasies and uses what he calls 
 a “play chemistry.” He says chance figures 
 considerably in the “triumphs” of medical science, 
 and he never considers anything absurd till he has 
 proved it so. With a keenness of perception which 
 did them credit, Ehrlich’s official taskmasters of 
 school days let him very much alone. Neither he 
 nor they were at all worried by his failure at the end 
 of the five-year term to pass his examinations. He 
 continued his university studies another year and 
 won his diploma by dint of independent research 
 work of the first order. 
 
 251 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 Ehrlich, a native Silesian, is still a young man, as 
 scientists go, for he is just fifty-nine. His father 
 was a business man, but he inherited science from 
 his paternal grandfather, who was still lecturing on 
 physics and botany at ninety. Ehrlich is a spare, 
 thin, nervous little man, hardly five feet high, with 
 greyish white hair and beard, rapidly turning yellow 
 from excessive smoking—his ruling passion. He is 
 never even photographed far away from a cigar. 
 Pale, penetrating blue eyes beam from behind heavy, 
 black-rimmed spectacles, over which Ehrlich peers 
 oftener than through, giving him a curiously 
 questioning, half-furtive expression. He has the 
 absent-mindedness and dowdiness of the German 
 professor of tradition. His cigar is the only thing 
 he never forgets, but he almost always overlooks 
 removing its ashes from the particular portion of his 
 clothes on which they chance to alight. His library 
 is as orderly, but no more so, than his personal 
 attire. Tables, chairs, sofa, desk and window-sills 
 are always piled high with books, papers and 
 pamphlets. Nobody ever dares to disturb the 
 systematic chaos of the place. Ehrlich once lent 
 a man some books and received others in return. 
 Neither ever thought of restoring them to their 
 rightful owner. One day, long afterwards, Ehrlich’s 
 books came back with a note from his friend, saying 
 he had married, moved and cleaned up his library. 
 Ehrlich replied: “I congratulate you on your 
 marriage, and thank you for sending back my books, 
 but if you think that because you have moved and 
 252 
 
PAUL EHRLICH 
 
 gotten married I am going to clear up my library 
 and find your books, you are very much mistaken.” 
 Ehrlich had a habit in his younger days of collecting 
 old linen, with which to clean slides. Cast-off 
 handkerchiefs and shirts were his specialities. 
 Once at a lecture, wanting to mop his brow, he 
 extracted from his pocket what he thought to be a 
 handkerchief, but which turned out to be a complete 
 nightgown belonging to his wife. 
 
 Through marriage and the profits of his dis¬ 
 coveries Ehrlich has become a wealthy man; but 
 he has never gone in for luxuries. Strong cigars are 
 his sole extravagance, as they are his inseparable 
 companions. The modest salary he earned as a 
 <yt)ung university professor a quarter of a century 
 ago, he says, used just to keep him supplied with his 
 favourite weed. 
 
 Ehrlich is the first Jew to receive the coveted title 
 of Excellent, conferred on him for the discovery of 
 “606.” He is primarily and actually a chemist, 
 but he is in the broadest sense and fundamentally a 
 philosopher. His “basic idea” amounts to a 
 philosophic theory of physical life. Germany 
 expects her greatest living scientist, in the afternoon 
 of his busy career, to accomplish still new wonders 
 on behalf of suffering humanity. 
 
XXX 
 
 POSADOWSKY 
 
 I N the Reichstag, the parliament of fourteen 
 parties, sits a patriarchal, white-bearded noble¬ 
 man, the only man in all that heterogeneous 
 assemblage who does not wear a party label. He 
 is Dr. Count Arthur von Posadowsky-Wehner, or 
 Count Posadowsky, as he is best known, M.P. for 
 the Westphalian industrial division of Bielefeld, 
 and Germany’s foremost Social Reformer. When 
 the warring factions which pass for Parties in the 
 Fatherland were looking for a candidate to wrest 
 Bielefeld from Socialism at the election of 1912, 
 they decided there was but one personality in 
 Germany strong enough to stem the red tide 
 already engulfing the country constituency by 
 constituency. Conservative, Catholic Clericals, 
 National Liberals and Radicals, sinking mutual 
 hatreds and opposing views, prevailed on Count 
 Posadowsky to contest the division in their joint 
 name. He consented, on the strict understanding 
 that he was to remain “a free man,” both in and 
 out of Parliament, and for the first time in many 
 years Bielefeld turned its back on Socialism. It 
 sent to the Reichstag a deputy who, as a long-time 
 member of the Kaiser’s cabinets, had set the 
 example, unique in Prussia-Germany, of being not 
 
 254 
 
POSADOWSKY 
 
 only a Minister of the Crown, but a representative 
 of the people. Bielefeld’s spokesman in Berlin is 
 in many respects the Fatherland’s most popular 
 politician. A year ago the German “Air Party,” 
 bent on outstripping French efforts in the same 
 direction, organised a German National Fund for 
 the promotion of military airmanship. To insure it 
 enthusiastic support from one end of the Empire 
 to another, Count Posadowsky was asked to be¬ 
 come the Honorary President. Within six months, 
 subscriptions aggregating $1,750,000 rolled in. The 
 French were beaten almost two to one. 
 
 Count Posadowsky owes his fame and popularity 
 to his eminent service as administrator and reformer 
 of German Social Legislation. He was not the 
 father of State Insurance, in which realm it has 
 truly been said that Germany is a generation 
 ahead of the rest of the world, but he was the 
 pioneer of the modern idea on which the whole 
 great scheme now rests, viz., that State care of the 
 sick, the injured, the disabled, and the old is not 
 a condescension, but an obligation. It was the 
 Posadowsky era at the German Imperial Ministry 
 of the Interior which first broke with the tradition 
 that Workmen’s Insurance was primarily a sop 
 to the proletariat for anti-Socialistic purposes. It 
 was Posadowsky who, abandoning the idea of 
 Patriarchalism, made the nation understand that 
 State Insurance was an institution intrenched in 
 justice and right. He caused it to be recognised as 
 a system which formed an indissoluble part of hu- 
 
 255 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 manity’s self-liberating process. It required courage 
 and tenacity to advocate these revolutionary views 
 as an active member of an aristocratic and semi- 
 autocratic Government. The closing hours of the 
 old century were ringing with demands for re-en¬ 
 forcement of Bismarck’s anti-Socialist repressive 
 laws. German industry, alarmed at the increasing 
 terrorism of Social Democracy, had accomplished 
 the passage of the so-called “Convict-Prison Law,” 
 providing penal servitude for strike-pickets who 
 molested blacklegs. It was the time when the in¬ 
 fluence of Von Miquel, the shrewd Prussian Chan¬ 
 cellor of the Exchequer known as the Finance 
 Sorcerer, was paramount. It was in such an en¬ 
 vironment that Count Posadowsky made bold to 
 proclaim the doctrine that the Labour movement 
 was not merely something to be tolerated by a quasi- 
 benevolent Government, but was a necessary and 
 commendable development of industrial life. He 
 was the first responsible German statesman to dis¬ 
 tinguish between Social Democracy and the aspira¬ 
 tions of the working classes as such, and to insist 
 that justice must be meted out to Labour on terms 
 of absolute equality with any other section of the 
 community. He consorted freely with Social 
 Democrats, because they were the recognised politi¬ 
 cal leaders of the working class. He found it per¬ 
 fectly natural for a Minister in charge of the de¬ 
 partment intimately concerned with the weal and 
 woe of Labour to consult the men to whom Labour 
 looked for guidance and protection. 
 
 256 
 
POSADOWSKY 
 
 Posadowsky became Imperial Home Secretary 
 in 1897. His debut at the Department of the 
 Interior, which followed four years of effective 
 work as Secretary of the Imperial Treasury, was 
 marked by a speech which denoted a programme 
 for his coming administration. He expressed the 
 belief that the Social Legislation system was 
 burdened with excessive laws and regulations. 
 He declared himself opposed to the policy of piling 
 constantly fresh paragraphs on to the statute books 
 and hampering industry with interfering police 
 measures. “Too much governing,” he asserted, 
 “gets on the nerves of the German people. We 
 must not convert the Fatherland into a ‘prison 
 state.’ ” That seditious utterance proved the key¬ 
 note of Posadowsky’s Social Reform policy — 
 simplification and modernisation. He advocated 
 his ideas fearlessly in private and public. It 
 used to be said that he had more backbone than all 
 his Ministerial colleagues put together. He had a 
 lively contempt for the German craze for orders and 
 decorations. His popularity with the masses was 
 achieved at the expense of becoming almost 
 persona non grata “higher up.” His tremendous 
 energy and seriousness were regarded a bore by the 
 Court clique, which resented Posadowsky’s demo¬ 
 cratic disregard of traditions and irrepressible 
 fondness for speaking plainly to the Emperor. In 
 those quarters originated the amusing story that the 
 Kaiser, fatigued by Posadowsky’s prosaic J'ortrdge, 
 was accustomed to bring them to an abrupt end by 
 
 257 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 causing the Imperial dachshunds to play about the 
 Home Secretary’s legs while he was in the midst 
 of a learned disquisition on Workmen’s Dwellings or 
 Factory Hygiene. It was said that for many months 
 before his retirement from office in 1907 Posadow- 
 sky was so little liked that he was practically black¬ 
 listed in Imperial quarters; but he had earned the 
 reputation of being the ablest, hardest-working, 
 and frankest official adviser Emperor William 
 ever had. 
 
 No mere list of the reforms which Posadowsky 
 introduced during his ten years at the Department 
 of the Interior conveys an adequate idea of what he 
 did to extend and develop the Social Legislation 
 scheme. Fuller recognition of the inherent rights 
 of the working classes was the keynote of his succes¬ 
 sive reforms. First to engage his attention was the 
 reorganisation of Invalid and Accident Insurance 
 on lines more considerate of the workman’s point of 
 view. He improved the Arbitration Courts in the 
 workers’ interest. He revised the provisions of 
 Sickness Insurance so that people left unfit for work 
 should be able at once to avail themselves of aid 
 for invalidity (i.e., disability or incapacity to earn 
 a living), instead of starving until the eighteenth 
 section of Paragraph 9,865-B could be legally 
 invoked in their behalf. He worked out a new set 
 of laws for the special benefit of the seafaring 
 population. He instituted measures for the restric¬ 
 tion and eventual abolition of child-labour and 
 “sweating.” He created a division of Labour 
 
 258 
 
POSADOWSICY 
 
 Records in the Imperial Statistical Office, which 
 has been of immense importance in the observation 
 and regulation of the labour market. He established 
 at Charlottenburg the world’s only Museum of 
 Workmen’s Welfare, a wonderful permanent exhibi¬ 
 tion of appliances for preservation of health and 
 prevention of accidents in shops and factory. He 
 inaugurated the policy of building and maintaining 
 dwelling-houses for small-salaried civil servants, 
 whose name in Germany is legion. He conferred 
 a boon on the shop assistants’ class by passing laws 
 compelling tradesmen to put up their shutters at 
 nine p.m. German clerks previously often worked 
 till midnight. In 1900, three years after entering 
 office, Posadowsky submitted to Parliament an 
 entirely new set of State Insurance Laws, which, 
 in particular, reconciled the long-standing dis¬ 
 crepancy between the status of agriculture and 
 industrial workers. His proposals were so mani¬ 
 festly equitable that the Social Democrats found it 
 desirable, practically for the first time, to support 
 laws submitted in the name of the Emperor. In 
 1903 the Act was again amended under Posadow- 
 sky’s leadership, the outstanding improvement be¬ 
 ing the enlargement of the maximum period allowed 
 for the receipt of sick benefit from thirteen to 
 twenty-six weeks. Posadowsky’s Insurance Reform 
 policy aimed consistently at extending the operation 
 of the law to classes previously excluded, and also 
 at increasing the benefit obtainable. 
 
 It is a mighty fabric which German State Insur- 
 259 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 ance represent to-day. Figures issued officially in 
 1911, the latest available, show that the gross income 
 of the system since its establishment thirty years 
 ago is $625,000,000, and $4,087,500,000 has been 
 paid out in benefits. Roundly fifteen million persons 
 are insured. The existing capital of the system is 
 $3-75°> 000 - 000 » of which $116,250,000 has been lent 
 for construction of workmen’s dwellings, $37,500,- 
 000 for institutions of public health, $25,000,000 
 to agriculturists in need of credit, $22,500,000 for 
 hospitals and sanatoria, and $18,750,000 for educa¬ 
 tional purposes, while $14,000,000 is invested in 
 hospitals, sanatoria, tuberculosis camps, convales¬ 
 cent homes and invalid-houses which are owned and 
 maintained by the State Insurance Administration 
 itself. It is small wonder that Britain and the rest 
 of the world look upon Germany as their school¬ 
 mistress in the field of State Insurance and Old 
 Age Pensions. She was a veteran in it before they 
 ever began to think about it. Her scheme is ad¬ 
 mittedly not yet perfect. She is even now reform¬ 
 ing the Old Age department so as to make pensions 
 available to those who have arrived at their sixty- 
 fifth year, instead of their seventieth, as hitherto. 
 German Insurance Reformers will not rest content 
 until the institution embraces protection for widows 
 and orphans and against unemployment. Those 
 are the problems with which the Posadowskys of 
 to-morrow will have to wrestle. 
 
 Count Posadowsky is a native of Silesia, and is 
 sixty-eight years old. His family is of ancient, noble 
 
 260 
 
POSADOWSKY 
 
 lineage, but their title of Count dates from the 
 days of Frederick the Great, who made the head of 
 the house a Count for brilliant services as a cavalry 
 general in the Silesian wars. A graduate of law 
 of Breslau University, Posadowsky entered the 
 Prussian Civil Service, in which he was first to dis¬ 
 tinguish himself as “Provincial Captain” of Posen, 
 a post ranking with a governorship. His talents as 
 an economist and organiser enabled him to accom¬ 
 plish wonders with chaotic Posen finances, and his 
 work attracted such favourable notice in Berlin 
 that he was called to the Cabinet, in 1893, as 
 Secretary of the Imperial Treasury. Although the 
 Dreadnought era had not yet dawned, Germany 
 even then was revealing a prodigious predilection 
 for money spending. Posadowsky adhered to the 
 principle of “No expenditure without revenue,” 
 and besides being the first Secretary of the Treasury 
 to effect an actual reduction of the Imperial Debt, 
 was the first under whom the rate of increase was 
 materially diminished. 
 
 In two other fields not directly associated with 
 Social Legislation Count Posadowsky has played a 
 prominent role. He is an earnest advocate of 
 Protection and of Temperance. He took a con¬ 
 spicuous part in the negotiations which enabled 
 Germany to conclude advantageous long-term 
 Reciprocity treaties with her neighbours in 1902. 
 He knows the power of the weapon Germany holds 
 in her tariff, but dislikes tariff wars. When Ger¬ 
 many and the United States were on the brink of 
 
 261 
 
MEN AROUND THE KAISER 
 
 fiscal hostilities, Posadowsky, in whose department 
 tariff affairs were controlled, said: “You don’t need 
 me for a tariff war. My office doorkeeper is good 
 enough for that.” At the International Anti- 
 Alcohol Congress in Bremen in 1903 Posadowsky 
 declared himself a teetotaler. He has always been 
 active in support of the abstinence movement, which 
 has a steep and stony path to tread in Germany, 
 despite the fact that it revolves on two mighty, 
 though widely divergent, poles—the support of 
 the Emperor William and Socialism’s boycott on 
 Schnaps (brandy). 
 
 Count Posadowsky, personification of the 
 aristocrat-democrat, is expected to give the country 
 many more proofs of his wisdom and progressive¬ 
 ness from his present eminence as the Independent 
 Member of the Reichstag. He is the first ex- 
 Imperial Minister to face the Government as a 
 Parliamentary critic, and he does not shrink 
 from speaking his mind when occasion demands. 
 Fluent acquaintance with the English language 
 and Anglo-Saxon literature has made him a 
 profound admirer of the liberal institutions of 
 Britain and the United States. They are the 
 ideals he cherishes for the Fatherland, already 
 vastly more modern in many of its conceptions 
 by dint of Posadowsky’s own life-work. 
 
 The End 
 

 
 
Date Due 
 
 MAR 9 qrf _ 
 
 ! Jill, i 9 47