Читать книгу Blood and Iron - John Hubert Greusel - Страница 26

The German crazy-quilt, of many hues and colors, and how this blanket was patched and mended through the years.

¶ From the 18th Century, and indeed before that time, to say nothing of years to come as late as 1871, there was in fact no Germany. The term was a mere geographical “designation.” We shall hear more of this, as Bismarck assumes the stupendous task of German unity, in a real sense of the word; but we will never understand what Bismarck and other statesmen who hoped for German unity had to deal with, unless we take a broad survey of conditions in Germany from the year 1750; not only from the political but also from the social and domestic side, as represented in 300-odd German principalities that like a crazy-quilt were thrown helter-skelter from Hamburg on the North to Vienna on the South.

¶ Many of the holdings were gained through musty papers from rulers of the ancient Holy Roman Empire, a nation Voltaire declared “neither holy, nor empire, nor Roman.”

¶ There were free cities, great landlords, and there were great robber-barons—thieves of high or low degree.

¶ At Cologne, Treves and Mayence archbishops held the lower valley of the Moselle, also some of finest parts of the Rhein valley.

¶ Next, came dukes, landgraves, margraves, cities of the Empire, and then still smaller, duchies in duodecimo, down through some 800 minor landlords who as the owners of some borough or village walked this earth genuine game cocks on their own dunghills. Political conditions were distressing; old feuds, old hates prevailed.

There were restrictions on commerce, statute labor, barbarous penal laws, religious persecution and Jew-baiting.

¶ In short, to make 300-odd jealous princelings join hands in national brotherhood is the complex problem that goes down through the years; generation after generation; till at last the one strong man appears, Otto von Bismarck, who in his supreme rise to power sees clearly that the only hope for Germany is in a complete social and political revolution, in which the changes in the German mind concerning political unity in governmental affairs must be as unusual as the transformations in the German mode of life.

¶ During the early part of the 18th Century, of which we are now writing, a certain bold political doctrine still stood unchallenged. It had come out of the dim and hoary past, and in effect it proclaimed the power of the fist. For centuries unnumbered the idea prevailed that a state defends itself against foreign foes, and otherwise conserves its existence through the direct will of a strong ruler, preferably a king brought up in arms.

Thus the “genius of the people” meant in effect the wisdom or the ignorance of the line of kings.

Under this theory, Prussia by slow degrees and through many sacrifices of blood and treasure, had become a great power.

¶ Fred: Wm. I., (1713–40), who was indeed a miser and a scoffer, freed little Prussia from debt and rebuilt cities ruined by the wars. He likewise established a system of compulsory education, made schoolmasters state officers, and contributed mightily to a higher standard.

And he went further still: he welcomed religious exiles from other parts of Germany; he settled thousands of immigrants on the raw lands; he saved his money, economized to the last pfennig, was prudent in a worldly sense, and to the end of his life remained intolerable foe of idleness.

¶ It was from this severe master that the Great Frederick (1740–86) learned the trick of laying his cane over the backs of peasants and crying out in rage: “Get to work!”

¶ Old Fritz continued his line of battle from 1740 to 1763, in various unequal contests with the Allies. He fought Austria, France, Russia, Sweden, Saxony, and Poland, and for a while he fought their allied strength. The upshot was that Prussian enemies at home and abroad were defeated and Prussia won first rank as a military and political power. This idea of military discipline, united with large worldly sagacity in the management of state affairs, marks and explains Prussia’s rise to power.

¶ But the decline was equally manifest under Fr: Wm. II, the Great Frederick’s nephew. Although he inherited a domain of six millions of people, banded under an excellent administrative system, sustained by the disciplined army of “Old Dessauer” (Prince Leopold), and although Fr: Wm. II found the huge sum of 40,000,000 thalers in his fighting uncle’s treasure chest, yet within a few years all these splendid advantages were frittered away in idle dalliance and the weak king found himself twenty millions in debt.

By the time he died, 1797, Prussia was riding to a fall; and disregarding plain measures for her own safety, she had reached the sad place where the sturdy old Prussian spirit of prudence and independence had become so compromised that Prussia almost deemed it unessential to preserve her own political life!

¶ Thus, within three generations, Prussia repeated the old story of human life, wherein the weak descendant eats up the strong sire’s goods. Frederick the Great died Aug. 17th, 1786. Within three years, France struck at the German lands; and within 20 years the old Constitution of the Empire was scoffed at by encircling enemies along the frontiers, led by France, while at home political disputants destroyed National spirit by exciting revolution after revolution. “Everywhere,” says Zimmermann, (Germany, p. 1618), “one felt the morning breeze of the new dispensation.” The cry of the people had to be answered, and the common man wanted to know not only “Why!” but “When!”

¶ For the ensuing 85 years clamor, disruption and disunion continue often accompanied by bloodshed; till through Bismarck’s great work over which he toiled for 40-odd years, came the final answer of the Imperial democracy, 1871.

¶ It is to be the labor of years with confusion worse confounded, as we go along. The Feudal system, with which Germany has been for centuries petrified, must be thrown off; the peasant laborers freed in some sort, whether social or political, the absurd restrictions of countless customs houses walling-in each petty principality, must be destroyed. Before a new Germany may emerge, if Germany is to emerge at all, a National faith must be stimulated, fighting blood stirred, wars waged. Then, and then only, may this idea of German Unity, long the puzzling mental preoccupation of the fathers, become a geographical actuality and a political fact.

¶ The German peasants’ sense of respect for vested authority, even when held by hated kings, made the common people of the various German states almost ox-like in their patience under harsh political conditions.

Between the power of petty tyrants and of foreign despots, there was no freedom worthy of the name.

The German lived for himself, aloof, suspicious, not caring particularly to change his condition.

Compromise after compromise, failure after failure, sorrow after sorrow must be recorded in the great story; but do not despair. In amazing manner, through blood and iron, Otto von Bismarck, our blond Pomeranian giant, will face, fight and finally conquer the bewildering cross-forces of his time—till “German national faith” is supreme.

¶ Paying no attention to its neighbor, each German state stood off by itself; each princeling had his army, in some instances only 25 men; each ruler had his castle, in imitation of Versailles; each state its custom house, its distinct court and rural costumes.

To go ten miles north or south was to find yourself in a new world; you could scarcely understand the mush-talk of the peasants, whereas the various Liliputian courts chattered in mongrel French, aped from Versailles.

¶ The minor courts of Germany imitated the excesses of Versailles; had dancing teachers from Paris, French barbers, French governesses, and French prostitutes.

Every young man of wealth was sent to Paris to acquire what was called “bon ton,” that is to say, familiarity with the vices of the day; the etiquette of the fan and the study of new ways to spend money wrung from over-taxed peasants of German provinces was also regarded as very important.

Even to speak German was held a mark of vulgarity; and what more despicable than to be ashamed of one’s ancestry?

¶ Unmoved by the sufferings of the peasants, Augustus III of Saxony applied himself to grand operas, written by queens of French society. While the peasants were living like beasts, Frederick Augustus, the successor, spent his time hunting red deer. The dukes of Coburg and Hildburghausen were miserable bankrupts. As a result of social excesses, Charles VII of Bavaria left a debt of forty millions. Charles Theodore, in some respects an enlightened monarch, is particularly remembered for three strange facts: That he once gave an opera in German and not in French; that he tried to sell off Bavaria, his inheritance, and move to a more congenial locality; and third, that he hired Rumford, the great chemist, to invent a soup, at low cost, to feed the poor, whose miseries had been growing on account of the bad government.

¶ Nor should we overlook the monarch at Zweibrucken, the Pfalzgraf Charles. His mania took the form of collecting pipes and toys, of which he had innumerable specimens from the ends of the earth. He kept also one thousand five hundred horses and a thousand dogs and cats. Every traveler had to take off his hat and bow at sight of the spire, on pain of being beaten by the Count’s constable.

¶ Charles Eugene, of Wuertemberg, slave to luxury, played pranks when he was not indulging in vices. He liked to alarm peasants at night with wild cries; and when a woman stuck her head out of the window, the monarch would throw a hoop and try to drag her outside. In a deep forest he built his castle “Solitude.”

¶ On his 50th birthday, he wrote to his subjects, promising to mend his life; the letter was read in all the churches. The people decided that he was in earnest, promised him more money, of which he was in sore need. His first step was to contract a left-handed marriage with Francisca von Bernedin, whom he raised to the rank of countess.

¶ His next step was to build a queer bird-cage for his new mate. Menzel says of this episode: “Records of every clime and of every age were here collected. A Turkish mosque contrasted its splendid dome with the pillared Roman temple and the steepled Gothic church. The castled turret rose by the massive Roman tower; the low picturesque hut of the modern peasant stood beneath the shelter of the gigantesque remains of antiquity; and imitations of the pyramids of Cestius, of the baths of Diocletian, a Roman senate-house and Roman dungeons, met the astonished eye.”

¶ Another amiable peculiarity of French-mongering German princelings in their petty monarchies, was man-stealing. Hard-pressed for funds, the practice was to kidnap peasants and sell them into foreign military service. The vile trade was dignified by court authority; followers of the game were known as “man merchants.”

¶ The Wuertemberg monarch in order to raise funds to complete the absurd castle for his mistress, took it into his head to sell 1,000 peasants to the Dutch, for the war in the Indies; and so deep lay the curse of tyranny that no public protest was raised. It is true that Schiller, the noble poet, who at this time was a student at Charles College, fled in disgust, but Schaubert, another poet, was not so fortunate; he was seized and imprisoned for ten years.

¶ The vile practice of man-stealing from the wretched peasantry long continued as a monarchical privilege. The Landgrave Frederick of Hesse-Cassel, on one occasion sent 12,800 Hessians to the British, to fight in America. English commissioners came over and inspected the captive men as though picking out stock at a cattle show. Should a parent protest, a son, a wife or a widow, the answer was the lash. Hanau furnished 1200 of these slave-soldiers, Waldeck several hundred. Seume, who was himself a victim to the system, deported to America, tells us in his Memoirs: “No one was safe; every means was resorted to, fraud, cunning, trickery, violence. Foreigners were thrown into prison, and sold.”

“There is a Hessian prince of high distinction,” says Huergelmer. “He has magnificent palaces, pheasant-preserves, at Wilhelmsbad, operas, mistresses, etc. These things cost money. He has, moreover, a hoard of debts, the result of the luxury of his sainted forefathers. What does the prince do in this dilemma? He seizes an unlucky fellow in the street, expends fifty dollars on his equipment, sends him out of the country, and gets a hundred dollars for him in exchange.”

¶ Frederick of Bayreuth expended all his revenues in building a grand opera house, for giving balls, parties, receptions and official functions to aristocrats. His successor Alexander fell under the sway of Lady Craven, a British adventuress, who led the peasants a merry chase for the cash; man-stealing was the old game; and one order alone from the British government called for 1,500 peasants.

¶ But why continue the recital of man’s inhumanities?

Charles of Brunswick, a spendthrift, who sold subjects into captivity, paid his ballet-master 30,000 a year. Frederick of Brunswick on one occasion sold 4,000 peasants to Britain, for the army.

¶ The terrible famine of 1770–72 added to the discontent of the common man, throughout Germany; he began to feel that it was the duty of kings to feed the hungry; bark, grass, leaves, carrion were eaten; disease spread; emigrations depopulated the Rheinlands; 20,000 left Bavaria alone; while upwards of 180,000 Bavarians died of hunger; in Saxony, the number that starved to death is placed at 100,000. Other kingdoms suffered heavily.

¶ In many of the provinces were laws to prevent immigration; those who tried to get Bavarians to leave the country were guilty of a crime, punishable by hanging. A similar punishment was exacted for marrying out of one’s native province.

¶ Also, the wretched condition of the roads added to the isolation of the various German provinces. Exacting customs’ duties, military espionages, a weak postal system, contributed to keep Germans unacquainted, except with near neighbors. He, indeed, was a bold man who had gone over the mountains or beyond his native valley. Even a journey of two days caused grave anxieties; the carriage was almost certain to be overturned in some deep rut and the travelers injured or killed; robbers lay in wait in the mountains; protection was almost unheard of; life and property were insecure; every traveler had to be his own policeman, and never issued forth on a journey without dagger, pistol and sword.

¶ Thus, 300 princelings, great or small, were determined to rule in their individual capacities; there was no Germany in fact, and that much of the German Empire that had outlived the gradual ruin of the old Holy Roman Empire, the great-ancestor of Germany, was now approaching complete dissolution.

The power lay no more in states, but in 300-odd local political bureaus, scattered everywhere, dominated often enough by an ambitious French prostitute, or by some lucky ballet-master.

¶ Then, there was August of Saxony, who is said to have been the father of 300 children. This foolish fellow’s fetes cost thalers by the wagon-load; one set of Chinese porcelains ran into the millions, and it cost 6,000 thalers to gild the gondolas for a night in June, to say nothing of the fancy ball.

¶ The Baden monarch, Charles William, built Carlsruhe in the deep forest, the better that his orgies be kept from prying eyes.

¶ Eberhardt of Wuertemberg gave the whole conduct of his government over to women and Jews—and by the way the Jews were the only saving force. As for the Graevenitz woman, she was king in petticoats. She mortgaged crown lands and raised hell generally. One day in church she made a fuss about not being mentioned among royal rulers, and the pastor immediately replied: “Madam, we mention you daily in our prayers when we say: ‘O Lord, deliver us from all evil!’ ” Once, in time of famine, Charles William scattered loaves of bread; the rabble maddened by hunger fought to the death for the dole!

¶ Also, there were Ernest of Hanover and Tony of Brunswick, two precious rascals, with all their retinue of mistresses, mistresses’ maids, mothers, hangers-on, and pimps. Carl Magnus had his Grehweiler palace costing 180,000 guelden. He grew so desperate that the Emperor sent him to a fortress for ten years’ imprisonment, for forging documents to raise the wind. Count Limburg-Styrum was a princeling whose army consisted of one colonel, six officers and two privates! Count William of Bueckeburg had a fort with 300 guns, defending a cabbage patch. Count Frederick of Salm-Kyrburg swindled the churches; and in tiny Schwarzburg-Sondershausen, only 15 miles square, was a royal palace of 350 rooms with clocks of all sizes, great and small, in each apartment. This count went mad over clocks, but was popular with the working class; often he would take a man off a job in order to laugh and joke.

Also, Frederick had original taste in military affairs; his army comprised 150 soldiers, with 28 guards on horseback. The prince prided himself on being a wrestler, and one day when a yokel threw the prince, the prince set up a great cry, “I slipped on a cherry stone!”—and this regardless of the fact that it was not the time of the year for cherries.

¶ There was another local ruler, Ludwig Guenther, who was fond of painting horses, and on his death 246-odd horse pictures adorned the walls of his palace.

¶ “Show a German a door and tell him to go through, and he will try to break a hole in the wall.”

¶ “Here, every one lives apart in his own narrow corner, with his own opinions; his wife and children round him; ever suspicious of the Government, as of his neighbor; judging everything from his personal point of view, and never from general grounds.”

¶ “The sentiment of individualism and the necessity for contradiction are developed to an inconceivable degree in the German.”

¶ The problem of directing this intense individualism is the problem of German unity.

¶ With rough manners, blunders, extravagances, absurdities, the hereditary princes continued to sponge on the peasants, generation after generation, till wretchedness spread far over the German lands. They had their châteaux, their dancing girls, their dogs, horses, cats, mistresses and their royal armies.

¶ The misery of centuries of oppression existed; petty monarchs exercised powers of life and death.

¶ The South German mocked the North German’s pronunciation. One set vowed that the “g” in “goose” is hard, the other proclaimed that the “g” is soft. One side went about mumbling with hard “g’s,” “A well-baked goose is a gracious gift of God,” whereupon the other side replied that all the “g’s” are “j’s,” that the “gute ganz” is really “jute janz,” and “Gottes” “Jottes.” And duels were fought over it.

¶ Nor was this all. An intense local pride expressed itself in grotesque dialects, unsoftened by intercourse with the outer world; also, there were outlandish fashions in dress and other domestic affairs.

¶ In Brunswick the women wore green aprons, curious black caps, the men buff coats, red vests with four rows of buttons, caps with crazy pompons, buckled slippers and gay ribbon garters.

¶ In lower Saxony the women wore flat straw hats, like a dinner plate, hair plastered down, head-dresses of gigantic black ribbons, aprons of gay stripes, and ten petticoats coming only a little below the knee. The men wore farce-comedy costumes, not unlike coachmen.

¶ In Pomerania-Rugen the women admired scarlet petticoats, knee-length, capes like turko-rugs, black veils, green garters and blue stockings. The men wore aprons like butchers, caps and long-tailed coats.

¶ The Hessian women preferred turbans of red, vestees of gay stuffs, blue, green or yellow knee-length skirts.

¶ The Baden men folk liked reds, greens and yellows, vests adorned with many ribbons, top boots, high white collars and funny-looking black coats. The women had their green aprons, puffed sleeves, and ten short petticoats.

¶ In East Prussia men wore double and triple vests. As for the women, they looked like animals in the zoo.

¶ In Wuertemberg, a typical landlord wore a blue peajacket with two rows of large silver buttons, two vests of high contrasting colors, a black sash, salmon-colored trousers, polished boots;—and carried a meerschaum pipe.

¶ In Bavaria one saw green vests, yodlers’ hats with tiny feathers, green leggings, or military boots; and among the women gay vestees, bright shawls and white kerchiefs.

¶ Thus, the dead-weight of centuries still lay like a mountain on the various German states.

¶ This dead-weight of olden times kept the German states bickering among themselves.

For long years past, the people were divided by political brawls, altercations, affrays, squabbles, feuds, often with the loss of life. The general disposition was choleric, pugnacious, litigious.

There was bad blood over principles and procedure, policies and plans.

To transform aloofness to neighborliness, tumult to conciliation, quarreling to friendliness, hostility to good will, dissent must give way to assent, distrust to faith, denial to admission, misgiving to conviction, political atheism to political revelation.

Such are some of the peculiarities of the human animal; and in political life human animals are prone to fight for self-interest, like dogs over a bone.

¶ We are not going to try to tell you of the many efforts by rash reformers, in the half-century of the dead-weight, leading to the rise of Prussia.

Again and again, far-sighted Germans, sick unto death at the way things were going, urged equality for all men before the law, equal taxation, restriction of the power of the nobles.

Strange as it may seem, the peasants themselves stood in the way. They did not care to change their condition, miserable as it was. They dreaded the future, preferred present miseries than to risk new ills. For example, on one occasion, a certain political idealist excited the peasants in revolt, assassinated 120 nobles, destroyed 264 castles. This was in the time of Joseph II, of Austria, the ruler filled with amazing ideas of equality. The peasants themselves were the first to protest, much as they detested the nobles; and the unsupported leaders died on the wheel, while 150 miserable followers were buried alive.

And yet, at that very moment, the idealistic Joseph, who with an excess of zeal, tried for political equality, made enemies of his nobles, enemies of his peasants, likewise. The great reformer was held a fanatic, intent on destroying government. Too far ahead of his time, his plans for political semi-equality failed.

¶ This monarch, thinking to make a lesson, had swindling nobles placed in the stocks, like common thieves.

Joseph was one of the first great democrats, in the modern sense. To him, the cause of the common man was sacred. He believed in genuine equality, but alas, he did not know how to bring about the political Millennium.

¶ He threw open the parks to the people; he proclaimed free speech and free thought; he abolished serfdom; he labored to construct a state-machine with one system of justice and one National plan.

Joseph, though overbrimming with emotions for the common man’s political salvation, failed to allow for the ignorance of his people, their stubborn avowal of local self-interests.

¶ And it fell out that his people thought that Joseph was trying to enslave them the more; ingratitude and misapprehensions followed, destroying the liberal reformer’s most cherished plans for his beloved Austria-Germany.

The word was passed alone that Joseph was a tyrant. You see, as frequently happens, the people preferred old abuses to new ways. The general population hugged their chains and refused to be delivered.

This singular belief in the past, rather than in the future, is indeed a human weakness and has checked and restrained the rise of intellectual freedom since the world began.

¶ It might all have been a good lesson to republicans, but the nobility assumed a threatening attitude and the peasants did not understand a monarch like Joseph.

Their idea of a king was a man going upstairs on horseback and eating spiders. A king must have powers of life and death and bags of gold. A citizen king was absurd.

The peasantry, on whom Joseph had endeavored to bestow many large democratic privileges, rose against him. He died Feb. 20, 1790, “a century too early,” says Jellenz, and as Remer adds, “misunderstood by a people unworthy of such a sovereign.”

¶ Germany, in the sad period between 1750 and 1806 had long been a European political jest; these are hard words, but it is the language of truth.

She had sunk so low that she saw no degradation in going off to fight French or British wars, while at home remaining a mere political nonentity.

She had sunk so low, under French influences, and through her own lack of self-control, that she forgot her great ancestors and her noble traditions.

She had sunk so low that her very children were brought up to despise the language of the Fatherland; the children scoffing at the parents, aped foreign ways rather than support German originality, strength and national genius; young men coming of age preferred to leave the land of their birth, mocked the simple German virtues, and occupied themselves in idle dalliance in Paris, or failing in this, set up imitations of French courts in the petty German monarchies.

Thus, finally Germany became insensible, indifferent and debased by stupid and selfish ideals from beyond the Vosges; till at last Germany became, literally, a land without a people, a people without a land.

¶ Worse still, the time came when, under these false teachings, a sense of shame no longer lived, to arouse great national interests and to recall degenerate sons to their solemn duties to their Fatherland.

Hundreds of noble Germans, at one time or another, during these dark years, tried in vain by voice or pen to restore national consciousness, but failed. The problem of German liberty seemed incapable of solution; and as for the still larger problem of German unity—that became a mere dream.

¶ We glorify here and now, the genius and the manhood of Bismarck as the one man who had the strength of purpose to recall to Germans the heroic tale of a free and united Fatherland.

It took him thirty years or more, through well-nigh superhuman striving; he preached, he cursed, he vilified, he used the iron rod.

He would have absolutely nothing to do with the political ideas from over the Vosges; he knew too well the curse of olden times, and his one great central emotion was to end that condition—as he hoped forever.