Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [197]
Admiration for the Kaiser during the early part of his reign was a national cult. After the prolonged rule of his grandfather, Wilhelm I, followed by the painful three months’ reign of a dying man, the advent of a young and vigorous monarch who obviously relished his role and played up to the glamour of a king was welcomed by the nation. His flashing eye and martial attitudes, his heroic poses enhanced by all that brilliant dress and stirring music could add, thrilled his subjects. Young men went to the court hairdresser to have their moustaches turned up in points by a special curling device; officers and bureaucrats practiced flashing their eyes; employers addressed their workers in the Kaiser’s most dynamic style, as did Diederich, title character of Heinrich Mann’s harsh satire of Wilhelmine Germany, Der Unterthan (The Loyal Subject): “I have taken the rudder into my own hands,” he says on inheriting the family factory. “My course is set 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.” The workers stare at him dumb with amazement and his assembled family with awe and respect.
The first half of the Kaiser’s reign which began in 1888 coincided with the first flush of the Nietzschean cult. The monarch’s ceaseless activity in every kind of endeavor made him seem to be the universal man, as if, rightfully in Germany, crowning the century of her greatest development, Übermensch had appeared, where else but at the head of the nation. Hero-worship was the natural consequence. Diederich in the novel sees the Kaiser for the first time at the head of a mounted squadron as he rides out with a face of “stony seriousness” to meet a workers’ demonstration at the Brandenburger Tor. Transported by loyalty, the workers, who have been shouting “Bread! Work!” now wave their hats and cry, “Follow him! Follow the Emperor!” Running alongside, Diederich stumbles and sits down violently in a puddle with his legs in the air, splashed with muddy water. The Kaiser, catching sight of him, slaps his thigh and says to his aide with a laugh, “There’s a royalist for you; there’s a loyal subject!” Diederich stares after him “from the depths of his puddle, open-mouthed.”
In Diederich, who is always brutalizing someone beneath him while sucking up to someone above him, Mann savagely portrayed one aspect of his countrymen—the servility which was the other side of the bully. The banker Edgar Speyer, returning to his birthplace in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1886 after twenty-seven years in England, found that three victorious wars and the establishment of Empire had created a changed atmosphere in Germany that was “intolerable” to him. German nationalism had replaced German liberalism. Great prosperity and self-satisfaction acted, it seemed to him, like a narcotic on the people, leaving them content to forego their liberty under a rampant militarism and a servility to Army and Kaiser that were “unbelievable.” University professors who in his youth had been leaders of liberalism “now kowtowed to the authorities in the most servile manner.” Oppressed, Speyer