Berlin

Of course, there were plenty of Berliners who pined for a sight of the imperial carriage and who fell over themselves to show their admiration for their emperor. Kaiser-worship was especially pronounced among the city’s younger middle-class males, many of whom had their mustaches curled upward at the tips a la Wilhelm. The city’s bureaucrats and businessmen often tried to act like mini-kaisers in their dealings with social or professional subordinates. Heinrich Mann brilliantly satirized such behavior via the ludicrous figure of Dietrich Hessling in his novel

Der Untertan (The Loyal Subject). Upon inheriting the family factory, Hessling declares to his workers: “I have taken the rudder into my own hands. My course is straight and I am guiding you to glorious times. Those who wish to help me are heartily welcome; whoever opposes me I will smash. There is only one master here and I am he. I am responsible only to God and my own conscience. You can always count on my fatherly benevolence but revolutionary sentiments will be shattered against my unbending will.” Imperious before his workers, Hessling becomes grotesquely servile in the presence of the emperor. Spotting the kaiser’s carriage, he runs along beside it to catch a glimpse of his hero, only to stumble and fall in the mud. Seeing him lying in a puddle, his legs in the air, the kaiser says to an aide, “There’s a royalist for you; there’s a loyal subject.”

Popular as the kaiser was among Berlin’s royalist set, he may well have alienated more citizens through his busybody presence than through his frequent absences. This was a man, Berliners said, who could not attend a funeral without wanting to be the corpse. Few citizens were surprised therefore by a bizarre incident involving their impetuous ruler that occurred during a performance by Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show in Berlin in 1889. As always, the star of the show, Annie Oakley, asked for a volunteer from the audience to smoke a cigar whose ash she would shoot off from a distance of thirty yards. In fact, Annie made this request simply for laughs; her long-suffering husband always stepped forward and offered himself as her human Havana holder. This time, however, the young kaiser himself leaped out of the royal box, strutted into the arena, extracted a cigar from a gold case, and lit it with a flourish. Annie was horrified but could not retract her dare without losing face. She thus paced off her distance, raised her Colt.45, took aim, and blew away the kaiser’s ashes. Had she blown away the kaiser instead, the subsequent history of Berlin, Germany, and indeed the entire world might have been very different. (Annie herself realized this later on. During World War I, she wrote the kaiser asking if she could have a second shot.)

Culture Wars

Kaiser Wilhelm II hoped to put his stamp on every aspect of Berlin’s artistic and intellectual life. He believed himself especially qualified for this role because in his spare time he liked to draw and write plays. He produced workmanlike renderings of ships and composed a play called Sardanapal

, featuring a king who immolates himself to avoid being captured by the enemy. So confident was he of his abilities that he made visiting heads of state sit through his play. Among his victims was his uncle Edward VII, who, forced to attend a gala production of Sardanapal, promptly fell asleep, only to awaken in the very realistic fire scene and demand that the fire department be called. Wilhelm’s efforts to impose his archconservative taste on the capital eventually inspired a backlash among the city’s cultural elite. In the end, no figure did more to promote the triumph of the modern spirit in Berlin than this champion of cultural orthodoxy.

The kaiser spelled out his aesthetic philosophy at the dedication of the Siegesallee:

An art which transgresses the laws and barriers outlined by Me, ceases to be an art; it is merely a factory product, a trade, and art must never become such a thing. The often misused word ‘liberty’. . . leads to license and presumption. . . . Art should help to educate the people; it should also give to the lower classes after their hard work . . . the possibility of lifting themselves up to ideals. . . . If art, as so frequently happens now, does nothing more than paint misery more ugly than it is, it sins against the German people. The cultivation of the ideal is, moreover, the greatest work of civilization; if we wish to be and remain an example for other countries, the entire nation must cooperate. If culture is going to fulfill its task, it must penetrate into the greatest layers of the people. This it can do only if it proffers a hand to uplift, instead of to debase.