The German Emperor as Shown in His Public Utterances. German Emperor William II
to regard the framing of the present Constitution and the building up of the present German Empire not as the last stage in the attempt to give freedom and self-government to the German people, but to guarantee and maintain the supremacy of Prussia. Whether or not this is a possible view, it is, in any case, one occasionally to be found implied in the speeches of the Emperor, and it came to open expression in the statement of William I that the empire was merely a “greater Prussia.” So, too, when a few years ago Alsace-Lorraine proved itself recalcitrant to the wishes of its imperial master, he threatened that he would make of it a “Prussian province.”[2]
[2] On this occasion a Socialist orator declared in the Reichstag: “We salute the imperial words as the confession, full of weight and coming from a competent source, that annexation to Prussia is the heaviest punishment that one can threaten to impose upon a people for its resistance against Germany. It is a punishment like hard labor in the penitentiary, with loss of civil rights.”
It need, therefore, not appear as startling as would otherwise be the case if on occasions which to us would seem peculiarly appropriate (as, for instance, the famous Königsberg speech, August 25, 1910) the Emperor makes no mention whatever of the Constitution. The sources of his power and the sanction for his authority he finds not in this instrument but in the history of his ancestors.
To understand the personality and the speeches of the Emperor it is, therefore, necessary to recall that he is also King of Prussia and that the foundation of his ancestors’ rule was laid in the province of Brandenburg, of which they became some centuries ago the margraves and electors. In 1300 Prussia was a wilderness inhabited by savages who were ruthlessly massacred by the Teutonic knights. It was looked upon as lying outside the German Empire. Through the knights the country was converted to Christianity, and the reduced native population was largely augmented by immigration from other German states.
Although the Emperor is not slow to accept traditions with regard to his house, he never mentions the old shoot in the genealogical tree of an elector which carries us back to one of the fugitives who fled from Troy with Æneas. For our purposes, it was not until 1273 that a count of Hohenzollern first came into prominence, when, after a fortunate marriage, he became burgrave of Nuremberg and prince of the Holy Roman Empire. With the exception of Frederick William II, they have been a thrifty race. A little more than a century later there appears in history that one of the Emperor’s ancestors to whom he frequently refers as the founder of his house and that one who began to acquire for it divine right.
Frederick VI of Hohenzollern had already come into prominence through the fact that he had cast in his lot with King Sigismund of Hungary. The services which he rendered the King, however valuable, were not altogether disinterested, and it is said that he largely increased his fortune thereby. He seems not to have been content with mere promises, and it is a matter of record that Sigismund pledged to him certain districts in Hungary as security for 40,000 gulden. As Frederick was to lay the foundation for the greatness of the house of Hohenzollern and as Emperor William is fond of repeating that he came to Brandenburg in obedience to a summons from on high, this chapter in the history of the Emperor’s house is particularly significant and interesting.
For some time previously Brandenburg had been unfortunate in its rulers and had frequently changed hands. In 1373 it had been sold for 500,000 gulden to Emperor Charles IV, who turned it over to his son Wenceslaus. In 1378 it passed to Wenceslaus’ half brother, the Sigismund mentioned above. Sigismund was in financial difficulty. A few years later, therefore, he pledged the mark of Brandenburg to his cousins Jobst and Procop of Moravia as security for a loan of 500,000 gulden. Sigismund defaulted payment in 1393, so that the margraviate passed to them. In 1410 Sigismund eagerly desired to be elected Emperor of Germany. He entrusted the management of what might quite properly be called his “campaign” to Frederick of Hohenzollern. Jobst of Moravia, who, as we have seen, now had claims to Brandenburg was a rival candidate. Sigismund, without deigning to make repayment, coolly declared that the transaction with Jobst concerning Brandenburg was null and void and instructed Frederick to cast the vote for the mark. To this vote Frederick clearly (if anything in these complicated proceedings is clear) had no right. He none the less managed the campaign and in a “snap” election cast the vote of Brandenburg with assurance. This at least was the view of other electors, and this high-handed performance did not meet with their approval. They called a rival council and elected Jobst to the imperial dignity. For both Sigismund and Frederick it was “fortunate” (we take the word from the Prussian historian Eberty) that Jobst died shortly after. It is perhaps unfortunate that it should have been suspected ever since that he died of poison.
Sigismund himself seems to have been somewhat doubtful about the validity of that election which Frederick had compassed and after the death of Jobst had himself re-elected and was finally acknowledged as Emperor. If the times were bad, Sigismund and Jobst were no better than their times. It was this same Sigismund who, after having granted a safe conduct to the great reformer John Huss, allowed him to be judicially murdered, a proceeding which made even Charles V blush for the empire.
For the purpose of electing Sigismund, Frederick had incurred considerable expense, amounting to some hundred thousand gulden. It is perhaps again fortunate for all concerned and for the honor of the venal empire that no bill of particulars specifying the uses of this fund is now available, if any was ever rendered. That Frederick, however, had not served Sigismund “pour l’amour de Dieu” is plain from the fact that he again took security for his advances. This time he was given the unhappy mark of Brandenburg which, as we have seen, had belonged to Jobst by virtue of a mortgage which Sigismund had never taken the trouble to discharge.
If, then, the law of God is at all similar to the law recognized by men, Sigismund had no right to give and the ancestor of William II no legal right to accept that province. The right by which Frederick came into possession of this first state of the later German Empire was, consequently, a right quite different from rights generally recognized. This, therefore, must be that “divine right” which William II is so fond of proclaiming. At its best, the document of June 7, 1411, which gave the Hohenzollerns their first claim to their first province was in reality a mortgage to a piece of property of doubtful title, and if the rather florid style of that document seems to bring in the business transaction as something quite incidental, it is altogether similar to the forms in which other mortgages were couched in those days. That this was so is further evidenced by the fact that the Brandenburg cities looked upon Frederick as the holder of a mortgage and did homage to him “zu seinem Gelde”—“for his money”; that is, they recognized that they were bound to him only until he should be paid. The nobles did not do homage to him at all. After “the rain of margraves” of the previous decades, it is not strange that they should have been slow to recognize their latest overlord. Emperor William II is, therefore, quite right when he describes the mark of May, 1412, as devastated, unruly, and altogether unpromising. It could hardly have been otherwise. Before Frederick was invested with Brandenburg (and he was formally invested only after a further payment of 400,000 gulden), in 1417, his princely possessions included merely partial claims to smaller districts like Ansbach and Bayreuth, which he shared with his brother John. In spite of Frederick of Hohenzollern’s devotion to the cause of religion, the Shakespearean motto, “Thrift, thrift, Horatio,” may be taken to explain satisfactorily his conduct in this regard. That the nobles would be unruly he must have expected. His own activities and his acceptance of the mark had helped to make them so. Frederick’s later service consisted in dispelling a confusion which he had helped to create.
In these larger transactions the first great Hohenzollern does not seem to have been given to listening to the still small voice. Incidentally, he was later to turn against Sigismund. The assumption, therefore, that he left his southern home for the mark out of heed for a divine call, as Emperor William in his speech of February 3, 1899, tells us that he did, is historically, like Laplace’s God, a useless hypothesis. Self-interest, for which he seems to have had a fairly keen sense, would have impelled him to do no less. Yet it is upon the faits et gestes of Frederick of Hohenzollern that Emperor William II bases his claims to rule Germany by divine right.
As