Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [196]
The Kaiser took immense care always to wear appropriate uniform for every occasion. When the Moscow Art Theatre played Berlin, he attended the performance in Russian uniform. He liked to arrange military pageants and festivals, especially the annual spring and autumn parades of the Berlin garrison on the huge Tempelhof Field, where formations of 50,000 troops, equivalent to several divisions, could maneuver. He felt himself no less an authority on the arts, on which he held decided if not advanced views. When Gerhart Hauptmann, author of The Weavers, a gloomy working-class drama, was designated by the judges to receive the Schiller Prize in 1896, the Kaiser awarded it instead to Ernst von Wildenbruch, a favorite of his own who produced historical dramas in the style of William Tell. When the Rhodes scholarships were established, the Kaiser nominated Germany’s candidates, “vulgar rich people,” according to a member of Balliol, “who don’t have a good effect at all.” One shot a deer in Magdalen College park and had to be recalled by the embarrassed monarch’s order. The Kaiser liked to think of himself, as he explained in his speech dedicating the Sieges Allee in 1901, as an “art-loving prince … around whom artists could gather” and in whose reign the arts could flourish as in classical times “in the direct intercourse of the employer with the artist.” As the employer in this case, he had given to the sculptors of the statues “clear and intelligible tasks” and “ordered and defined” their work but thereafter left them free to carry out his ideas. He could now take pride in the results, which were “untainted by so-called modern tendencies.”
Art, he announced, should represent the Ideal. “To us Germans great ideals, lost to other peoples, have become permanent possessions” which “only the German people” can preserve. He cited the educational effect of art upon the lower classes, who after a hard working day could be lifted out of themselves by contemplation of beauty and the Ideal. But, he sternly warned, “when art descends into the gutter as so often nowadays, choosing to represent misery as even more unlovely than it is already,” then art “sins against the German people.” As the country’s ruler he felt deeply hurt when the masters of art “do not with sufficient energy oppose such tendencies.”
The theatre too, he explained in 1898, should contribute to culture of the soul, elevate morals and “inculcate respect for the highest traditions of our German Fatherland.” So that the Royal Theatre, which he invariably referred to as “my theatre,” should perform this function, he arranged a series of his favorite historical dramas for working-class attendance at suitable prices. He was a stickler for accuracy of detail in scenery and costumes and, for a ballet-pantomime on Sardanapalus, ransacked the museums of the world for information on Assyrian chariots.
He liked to attend and even personally direct rehearsals at the Royal Opera and Royal Theatre. Driving up in his Imperial black and yellow motorcar, he would establish himself at a big business-like table in the auditorium, furnished with a pile of paper and array of pencils. An aide in uniform stood alongside and held up his hand whenever the Kaiser signed to him, whereupon the performance halted, the Kaiser with gestures explained what improvements he wanted, and the actors tried again. He referred to the actors as “meine Schauspieler,” and once when one of them, Max Pohl, was suddenly taken ill, he said to an acquaintance, “Fancy, my Pohl had a seizure yesterday.” The acquaintance, thinking he meant a pet dog who had had a fit, commiserated, “Ach, the poor brute.”
In music the Kaiser’s tastes were naturally conservative. He liked Bach, the greatest of all, and Handel. As regards opera, to which he was devoted if it was German, he would say, “Gluck is the man for me; Wagner is too noisy.” At performances he stayed to the end