Berlin

While snubbing Franz Josef, the Berliners turned out in droves for the first major spectacle of the Three Emperors’ Meeting, a military review on Tempelhof Field. Arriving at the field early in the morning of September 7, Vizetelly found the area already clogged with carriages and vendors selling sausages, butter rolls, and “Das Bier der Drei Kaiser (the Beer of the Three Kaisers).” The sun rose in the clear sky to pour its rays upon the assembled multitudes, “causing the perspiration to stream from beneath the helmets of the mounted police, tanning the complexions of the lovely Jewesses whom one saw on every side, half smothered in gauze and cashmere, and rendering the glossy black carriage horses skittish and irritable, and the poor, broken-down droschken hacks still more weary and dispirited.”

People soon forgot the heat, however, as across the sandy plain brilliantly accoutred cavalry began wheeling in formation, their helmets flashing in the sun. Although most of the riders were German, horsemen from Austria and Russia were also in evidence, cantering flank to flank behind the three emperors. “All were intermingled, all pressed together in one compact particoloured mass in which red, blue, green, black, white, and grey, picked out with gold, could be distinguished,” observed Vizetelly. In retrospect, of course, this glittering moment can be seen as an innocent harbinger of the rather less harmonious martial entanglement to come a generation later.

That evening Wilhelm I put on a gala banquet at the palace, combining huge amounts of food and drink with extreme punctiliousness of etiquette. Britain’s Queen Victoria, happily ensconced in London, sniffed at the whole business in a letter to her daughter Vicky, who as the wife of Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm was obliged to be in attendance. “I pity you indeed to have to be at Berlin for that week of Emperors. . . . How

ever will you manage between the Kaisers as to rank?... Every Sovereign is alike—& no one yields to the other. . . . What

will happen? I should really be amused to hear.” In the event, Franz Josef got to sit next to Wilhelm because he had been on the throne longer than the Czar, who was seated next to Vicky. She was not happy with this arrangement, resenting Alexander for having given her teenage son Willy a grenadier uniform, thus encouraging his blossoming militarism. In fact, Vicky was unimpressed with the entire occasion, which she informed her mother was “more like an immense bivouac than anything else.” Present here, as at all the other events during the meeting, was Count Bismarck, the true orchestrator of the affair. Unlike Vicky, who saw nothing but bother in this kind of thing, Bismarck understood how useful it could be politically—at least as long as the imperial guests were kept on a tight leash. “We have witnessed a novel sight today,” Bismarck told Odo Russell after the opening banquet.

It is the first time in history that three emperors have sat down to dinner together for the promotion of peace. I wanted these emperors to form a loving group, like Canova’s three graces. I wanted them to stand in a silent group and allow themselves to be admired, but I was determined not to allow them to talk, and that I have achieved, difficult as it was, because they all three think themselves greater statesmen than they are.

The “bivouac” continued that evening with a Zapfenstreich (a Prussian military tattoo) on the Opernplatz in the shadow of the statue of Frederick the Great. Columns of guardsmen bearing torches goose-stepped across the square, looking to Vizetelly like “soldiers of the middle ages carrying fire and sword within some doomed city.” Suddenly, over the sound of drums and cymbals, came piercing cries of distress, startling the observers but not interrupting the ceremony. Later, it was learned that the Berlin police, anxious to clear curious crowds from the route leading back to the palace, had charged into the throng, pinning hundreds of men, women, and children against buildings and fences. Eight people were killed and ten badly wounded. In this respect, too, the festivities at the Three Emperors’ Meeting anticipated ugly events to come.

For the moment, however, Berlin basked in its new status as the “diplomatic navel” of Europe. Bismarck exploited the good will generated by the conference to create the Three Emperors’ League, which was formally inaugurated in the following year. Although little more than a declaration of common interest in monarchical principles, the League was certainly a triumph of Bismarckian diplomacy. It was also a triumph for the new German capital, which in hosting the preparatory meeting demonstrated its arrival as a center of Grosse Politik in the last third of the nineteenth century.