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By Root 1282 0

celebrated specialist in pathological conditions discoursed on medical details, Moltke’s divorced and vindictive wife was called to testify, charges of subornation and perjury were added, Chancellor Büllow was himself accused of perversion by a half-crazed crusader for the legal rights of homosexuals and forced to sue, the verdict of the first trial in favor of Harden was reversed by a second trial and re-reversed in a third at which Eulenburg, now ill, disgraced and under arrest, was brought to court in a hospital bed. The public felt uneasily that justice was being tampered with, readers of Die Zukunjt were given an impression of perversion everywhere and the prestige of Kaiser and court sank. At the same time in Vienna the Emperor’s brother, Archduke Ludwig-Viktor, known as Luzi-Wuzi, became involved in a scandal with a masseur.

In England the three trials of Oscar Wilde had blazed and been put out within two months; the establishment turned its back on him and destroyed him. In Germany the establishment itself was on trial. In the midst of it, in October, 1908, came the tremendous gaffe of Kaiser Wilhelm’s interview on foreign affairs in the Daily Telegraph, in which his more than usually indiscreet opinions, carelessly allowed to pass by Billow, aroused the fury and hilarity of nations and questions as to his sanity at home. Some even demanded his abdication. Billow, maneuvering neatly as he thought, virtually apologized in the Reichstag for his sovereign who never forgave him. Hurt and indignant, the Kaiser retired to the estate of his friend Prince Fürstenberg, where, in the course of an evening’s festivities, Count Hülsen-Haeseler, chief of the Military Cabinet, appeared in a pink ballet skirt and rose wreath and “danced beautifully,” affording everybody much entertainment. On finishing he dropped dead of heart failure. Rigor mortis having set in by the time the doctors came, the General’s body could only with the greatest difficulty be divested of its ballet costume and restored to the propriety of military uniform. It had not been a happy year for the Kaiser, although six months later he at least had the satisfaction of forcing the resignation of Bülow.

Damage to the image of the ruling caste caused its members to swagger more than ever. As the Kaiser’s prestige slipped, the trend of the extreme militants grew in favor of the Crown Prince, a strutting creature whose flatterers told him he resembled Frederick the Great, as indeed, facially, he did. In the eternal duel of reigning monarch and eldest son, Wilhelm II and “little Willy” felt required to outdo each other in bombast. “I stand in shining armor” and similar pronouncements of the Kaiser were of this period. The nation’s mood of conscious power could absorb unlimited bombast. Germans knew themselves to be the strongest military power on earth, the most efficient merchants, the busiest bankers, penetrating every continent, financing the Turks, flinging out a railroad from Berlin to Baghdad, gaining the trade of Latin America, challenging the sea power of Great Britain, and in the realm of intellect systematically organizing, under the concept Wissenschaft, every branch of human knowledge. They were deserving and capable of mastery of the world. Rule by the best must be fulfilled. By this time Nietzsche, as Brandes wrote in 1909, held “undisputed sway” over the minds of his countrymen. What they lacked and hungered for was the world’s acknowledgment of their mastery. So long as it was denied, frustration grew and with it the desire to compel acknowledgment by the sword. Talk of war became a commonplace. When the Kaiser’s troublesome Rhodes scholars got drunk they threatened Oxford colleagues “with invasion and castigation at the hands of the German Army.” In 1912 General Bernhardi, the leading military theorist of his day, proclaimed the coming necessity in a book of indisputable authority and conviction whose title was Germany and the Next War.

The other Germany, the Germany of intellect and sentiment, the liberal Germany which lost in 1848 and never tried