Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [29]
Germany’s fields and forests were beautifully tended, its towns clean, its roads and rails smooth, its factories new and thrumming with energy. There were no equivalents of the peasant hovels of Hungary and Belgium, the slums of Italy, the trash heaps and hideous advertising that blighted the American scene. Neat shops and markets bulged with produce. The efficient movement of traffic in the streets, obedient to every police signal, bespoke a national desire for order and discipline. This was plainly a country where everything worked.
Except, to Roosevelt’s amusement, the timing and choice of terminus for his arrival in Berlin. There was a frenzied scurrying of imperial officials before he was apologetically received at Stettiner Bahnhof at 9:15 A.M. on Tuesday. They said that the Kaiser would have been present if protocol had not confined him to Potsdam. His Majesty expected the whole Roosevelt family there at noon.
Checking in first at the American Embassy, Roosevelt sprayed his bronchi and prepared to meet a ruler he felt he had gotten to know almost personally as president. The prospect was not intimidating. Wilhelm II in 1910 was no longer the most dangerous man on the international scene. Two years earlier, he had come close to abdicating, after boasting too frankly about the German naval program to a British reporter. Since then, he had been further embarrassed by a homosexual scandal involving his circle of intimates. The hushed-up details were lurid enough for Wilhelm to remain in dread of the oligarchy of generals, admirals, and professors who held real power in Germany.
“THEY STOLIDLY BELIEVED THAT GERMANY WAS THE FOREMOST NATION IN EUROPE.”
The Reich around the time of Roosevelt’s visit. (photo credit i2.2)
Fortunately for him, those Prussians were archtraditionalists, devoted to Hohenzollern rule. They thought of him as their homeland king, more than they cared about him being emperor of the multipartite Reich, which had yet to celebrate its fortieth anniversary. And he (a fantasist of Münchausian dimensions) saw himself as Frederick the Great reincarnated, with his love of male society, his need for performance art, and his obsession with military display.
He received the Roosevelts outside Frederick’s Neue Palais, wearing the white-and-gold tunic of the Garde du Corps and a brass helmet, on which rode a silver spread eagle. Removed, the helmet revealed gray hair fast turning to white. At forty-nine the Kaiser was still, with his slate-blue eyes and erectile mustache, a transfixing figure—even if some of the fixity was provoked by his too-small left arm, cramped by forceps at birth.
Were it not for that deformity, and the laughable contrast between his finery and Roosevelt’s black frock coat and top hat, the two men were alike enough to be brothers. They were the same height at five feet nine, the same weight at two hundred–odd pounds, and both hyperenergetic, with punchy gestures and body-shaking laughs. Their diction was clipped (the Kaiser spoke flawless English) and their talk torrential. But whereas Roosevelt was a careful listener and responder, Wilhelm heard little. He deviated in all directions, not out of evasiveness, but instability.
“HE … SINCERELY BELIEVED HIMSELF TO BE A DEMI-GOD.”
Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany, ca. 1910. (photo credit i2.3)
They sat apart during lunch in the Jasper Room, doing duty with each other’s wives. Elsewhere around the six small tables, Kermit and Ethel followed suit with diplomats and government officials, including Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg. When the