Three German notes

Following Wednesday's Thomas Mann post, by sheerest coincidence I happen to have three German notes for today:

1 Among the many memorable anecdotes that adorn Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower (1966), the mordant, grotesque black comedy of this brief scene from the life of Kaiser Wilhelm II is nearly unmatched:

[T]he Kaiser retired to the estate of his friend Prince Fursternberg, where, in the course of an evening's festivities, Count Hulsen-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.

If only the Kaiser's friends had been as resourceful as Bernie Gunther, hero of Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir, who, when confronted with a body that needed dressing and moving, knew to bend and twist and essentially massage the man to slow the onset of rigor mortis.

2 Describing the Kaiser on his accession to the throne at age twenty-nine in 1888, Tuchman writes,

His firs proclamation on his accession was addressed, not like his father's, "To My People," but, "To My Army." It announced, "We belong to each other, I and the Army; we were born for each other." The relationship he had in mind was explained in advice to a company of young recruits: "If your Emperor commands you to do so you must fire on your father and mother." His sense of personal responsibility for the affairs of Germany and of Europe was expressed in the frequent "I's" and "My's" that bedizened his talk. "There is only one master in the Reich and that is I; I shall tolerate no other." Or, some years later, "There is no balance of power in Europe but me--me and my twenty-five army corps." He was willing, however, to make room for the Almighty who figured as the "ancient Ally of my House."

Which leads me to a question: did the Kaiser have any good qualities? I'm far from an expert, but in my reading about the period, I can't recall anyone having a single good thing to say about him--and that's before we take account of the fact that he was the model of the "strong man" for whose leadership many Germans yearned in the years just before Hitler' rise. Anyone willing to offer even a partial a defense of Kaiser Bill?

3 Speaking of Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir, I finally read it over the weekend on the recommendation of Sarah Weinman, and it didn't disappoint. The three novels it comprises, set in pre- and post-war Germany, show, through the eyes of a Nazi-hating former police detective, how Hitler transformed Berlin into

a big haunted house with dark corners, gloomy staircases, sinister cellars, locked rooms and a whole attic of poltergeists on the loose,

and then how American and Russian bombs made it a desperate ruin. The novels are dark, emotionally and morally complicated, and fundamentally serious--to the point that when Kerr pointedly evokes Graham Greene's The Third Man in the final volume he doesn't lose by the unavoidable comparison.

One of the most memorable aspects of Berlin Noir was also one of its most casual: Kerr's constant use of unusual slang, presumably German words that were current in the period. Some examples: safe is a "nut"--and a safecracker therefore a "nutcracker"--a person in jail is "in the cement," a gun is a "lighter," a prostitute is a "snapper" or a "chocolady," a madman is a "spinner," and fingers and fingerprints are "piano players." In a book that is careful and evocative with language--where an enemy is described as showing a "razor blade of a smile"--the slang stands out, adding verisimilitude to Kerr's meticulous recreation of the mood and milieu of wartime Berlin.

Peer pressure, or, the Lord Novelist-Poet of Dorset

{Photo by rocketlass.}

While reading Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1941 (1966) last week, I was surprised to find that her account of a 1909 English Parliamentary crisis brought in an old I've Been Reading Lately favorite. The crisis came about when the Chancellor of the Exchequer,David Lloyd George, in need of extraordinary new revenue to make good on the Liberal Party's campaign promises while also continuing to build England's new fleet of dreadnoughts, proposed what became known as the People's Budget. The budget was one of the earliest salvos in the slow march of serious taxation on the hereditary holdings of the English nobility, and its proposed taxes on inherited and undeveloped land "aroused the whole of the landowning class in furious resentment, as it was intended to." Tuchman notes,

Lloyd George pressed it home in public mockery and appeals to the populace as blatant as when Mark Antony wept over Caesar's wounds. Personifying the enemy as "the Dukes," he told a working-class audience of four thousand at Limehouse in London's East End, "A fully equipped Duke costs as much to keep up as two Dreadnoughts . . . is just as great a terror and lasts longer."

The budget was passed easily by the Liberal-dominated House of Commons, after which it was sent to the House of Lords, which at that point technically still exercised veto power over all legislation.

Traditionally, however, the House of Lords had always allowed finance bills to pass, for reasons that Tuchman explains:

[A]s Lord Salisbury had once pointed out over an earlier budget, there was no constitutional bar to the Lords throwing out a Finance Bill--only a practical one: they could not throw out the Government of the day along with it. To reject a budget and leave the Government in power would amount to deadlock.

As a budget, unlike other legislation, is absolutely necessary for the continued running of the government, its rejection by the House of Lords, if followed by the Commons standing strong and refusing to amend the bill, would have left England in an untenable position. The Government's response was to threaten the unthinkable: they would

advise the King to create enough Peers to provide a Liberal majority in the House of Lords, as many as five hundred if necessary, a deluge that would drown the hereditary peerage.

The next year saw wrangling and intransigence, followed by a general election that returned a similar majority for the Liberals, after which Prime Minister H. H. Asquith convinced George V to agree, at least in principle, to the creation of the necessary new Liberal Peers--which is where our literary friends unexpectedly enter the picture:

At some undated stage in the proceedings Asquith drew up, or caused to be drawn up, a list of some 250 names for wholesale ennobling, which, though it included Sir Thomas Lipton, did not altogether deserve Lloyd George's sneer about glorified grocers. On the list along with Lipton were Asquith's brother-in-law, H. J. Tennant, as well as his devoted admirer and future biographer, J. A. Spender; also Sir Edgar Speyer, Bertrand Russell, General Baden-Powell, General Sir Ian Hamilton, the jurist Sir Frederick Pollock, the historians Sir George Trevelyan and G. P. Gooch, the South African millionaire Sir Abe Bailey, Gilbert Murray, J. M. Barrie, Thomas Hardy, and Anthony Hope, author of The Prisoner of Zenda.

The thought of any of those last three being named to the House of Lords is a definitely amusing, but of course it's Hardy who really caught my eye. It's so hard to imagine the odd, quiet, apolitical country man that Hardy was by the early 1900s being made a Peer--especially for such openly political reasons. I wonder if he would even have accepted the honor? Though Asquith knew him to be a Liberal supporter, following a meeting between the two arranged by Edmund Gosse, Hardy had just a few years earlier shown himself reticent about accepting honors, dithering to the point of stasis about a mere knighthood. As Claire Tomalin describes it,

Mr Asquith, as Prime Minister, offered Hardy a knighthood, an honour Englishmen traditionally accept with the excuse that they are doing so to please their wives. Hardy sent a curious reply to Asquith, expressing his warm admiration for his policies, but saying he would like to think over the proposed knighthood for a year. Although this was politely agreed to, it does not seem to have been brought up again, and Emma remained plain Mrs Hardy.

Oddly enough (but in keeping with the difficulties that Emma faced as Hardy's wife--and her tendency to carefully nurse them into thriving grievances), he later accepted the Order of Merit,

a much more distinguished award but one that carried no "Sir" or "Lady." The nearest she got to her wish was that among her Dorset neighbours some of the children called her "Lady Emma" behind her back, in mocking tribute to her sense of her own importance.

Thomas, Lord Hardy of Dorset--is that what he would have been had Asquith acted on his plan? And if, as despite my doubts is not impossible to imagine, Hardy had embraced his new role, how might that have changed his later career? Mightn't a public role, with all the renewed attention and even adulation that might have accompanied it, have mitigated the grief occasioned by his Emma's death, which seems to have fueled so much of his subsequent poetry? Is there, in some parallel universe, an aging Hardy who, fat and happy, recites patriotic verse to rapt society audiences on the eve of the Great War?

Poets and politics

Reading Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 (1965) this weekend, I came across an incident that can surely be entered as evidence on the side of those who argue that poets should stay out of politics. In the course of describing the interlocking circles of government and society in 1890s England, Tuchman tells of Prime Minister Lord Salisbury's decision in 1895 to fill the post of Poet Laureate, which had been vacant since the death of Tennyson in 1892.

The problem with that decision, however, was that Salisbury had almost no interest in anything beyond the work of government and the duties and privileges of the upper class; Tuchman cites earlier as a telling example Salisbury's blase approach to appointing churchmen:

Once when two clergymen with similar names were candidates for a vacant bishopric, he appointed the one not recommended by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and this being sorrowfully drawn to his attention, he said, "Oh, I daresay he will do just as well."

His choice for Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin, perhaps did not do quite as well as others. Tuchman, clearly enjoying herself, describes him thus:

A journalist of deep Conservative dye, founder and editor of the National Review, Austin was also the producer of fervent topical verse on such occasions as the death of Disraeli. When a friend pointed out grammatical errors in his poems, Austin said, "I dare not alter these things. They come to me from above."

A mere two weeks into his laureateship, Austin found himself coming under the scorn of the literary for a poem h published in the Times celebrating the Jameson Raid, Leander Starr Jameson's foolhardy attempt to provoke an uprising in the Transvaal (which, though it took a couple of years, did eventually erupt into the Boer War). The lines Tuchman quotes are impressively dreadful--and surprisingly mawkish, considering they're describing a violent raid:

There are girls in the gold-reef city,
There are mothers and children too!
And they cry, Hurry up! for pity!
So what could a brave man do? . . .

So we forded and galloepd forward,
As hard as our beasts could pelt,
First eastward, then trending northward,
Right over the rolling veldt.

I have to admit, though, that I like the sound of "hard as our beasts could pelt," and the way it rolls nicely into "First eastward, then trending northward"; though the fact that that second line essentially does no useful work makes it hard to approve.

If the writer of Austin's Wikipedia entry is to be believed, his nature poetry is better, if not brilliant. He doesn't rate an entry in the Norton Anthology of Poetry these days, but the one sample adduced in his Wikipedia entry, "To England," though its first half is awkwardly overwritten and cloying, does offer some memorable images and sounds in its final lines:

To England

(Written in mid-Channel)

Now upon English soil I soon shall stand,
Homeward from climes that fancy deems more fair;
And well I know that there will greet me there
No soft foam fawning upon smiling strand,
No scent of orange-groves, no zephyrs bland;
But Amazonian March, with breast half bare
And sleety arrows whistling through the air,
Will be my welcome from that burly land.
Yet he who boasts his birth-place yonder lies
Owns in his heart a mood akin to scorn
For sensuous slopes that bask 'neath Southern skies,
Teeming with wine and prodigal of corn,
And, gazing through the mist with misty eyes,
Blesses the brave bleak land where he was born.

Those "sleety arrows" are nice, and I admire the confidence shown by the simple repetition of "mist" and "misty" in the penultimate line, a good lead into the best moment of the poem, those harsh "b" and "k" sounds of its close, calling up as they do Dover's beautiful but unwelcoming sea cliffs.

Even in this poem, though, we can see how Austin's love of country and love of nature intertwined, so it's not hard to understand why he might have felt that forays into politics and topical verse were suitable, especially once he was the Laureate. Still, one has to wonder about a poet who, as Tuchman notes, when asked his idea of heaven, replies,

He desired to sit in a garden and receive a flow of telegrams announcing alternately a British victory by sea and a British victory by land.

I'm neither a poet nor a believer, but if I were, my idea of heaven would definitely involve more books and fewer battles, victories or not.