Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [31]
Lifting his hat every time Wilhelm touched his helmet, Roosevelt mantained a genial façade, but was aware only of the vast difference between himself and his host. It was not simply that the Kaiser held power, while he had none, nor the obvious fact that they were king and commoner. It was that he, self-made, had an integrated point of view, whereas Wilhelm personified the classic German neurosis of the Doppelgänger. Born to power, but also to disability, the Kaiser had “a sort of double-barreled perspective” on everything. One self—the imperial—surveyed the passing troops, exulting in supreme command. The other self—Wilhelm’s “mental ghost”—had ridden some way off, and was observing the whole scene with a quizzical detachment. Of the two, man and ghost, the former was the more disturbing to Roosevelt. “He was actually, as far as I could discover, one of the last of those curious creatures who sincerely believed himself to be a demi-god.”
“THE COLONEL OF THE ROUGH RIDERS LECTURING THE CHIEF OF THE GERMAN ARMY.”
Wilhelm II’s caption to this photograph of himself and Roosevelt at Döberitz. (photo credit i2.4)
When Edith saw her husband alone, late in the day, she got the feeling that he had undergone an epiphany. “I’m absolutely certain now, that we’re all in for it,” he told her. “Facts and figures … aren’t half so convincing as the direct scrutiny of a thing—especially such a monstrous thing as this!”
HE RECOVERED HIS CHEERFULNESS overnight, along with much of his voice. This encouraged him to address the University of Berlin in person, dispensing with the offer of a substitute reader. The proceedings in the Aula auditorium amounted to a Germanic replay of those at the Sorbonne, only now, Roosevelt was made a Doktor of philosophy, and spoke with an emperor smiling and nodding at his feet.
Wilhelm had never visited the university before, so the atmosphere was stiff. Five jackbooted commanders of the student army corps stood immobile on the platform, swords drawn, throughout Roosevelt’s eight-thousand-word speech. He gave it in English, but in view of its length it was untranslated, and received in a heavy silence. Defining his theme as “The World Movement,” he began with a hoarse preamble on the rise and fall of civilizations. Germans, he said, had developed early as “castle-builders, city-founders, road-makers.” They had turned back waves of barbaric invaders from the East, and helped Christianize Danes and Magyars and Slavs. He made much of the day when “the great house of Hohenzollern rose, the house which has at last seen Germany spring into a commanding position in the very forefront of the nations of mankind.”
Roosevelt had learned as president that the Kaiser needed praise as much as oxygen, so he kept invoking imperial values as he went on. But when he remarked on the longevity of some cultures, as opposed to others that died, he used one of Wilhelm’s least favorite words, dropping it like acid into the balm of his previous flattery. “Those ideas and influences in our lives which we can consciously trace back at all are in the great majority of instances to be traced to the Jew, the Greek, and the Roman.”
Nor was he finished:
The case of the Jew was quite exceptional. His was a small nation, of little more consequence than the sister nations of Moab and Damascus … [yet] he survived, while all his fellows died. In the spiritual domain he contributed a religion which has been the most potent of all factors in its effect on the subsequent history of mankind; but none of his other contributions compare with the legacies left us by the Greek and the Roman.
The last statement, at least, was calculated to get the Kaiser’s head nodding again. Roosevelt swung into his main