Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires (11 page)

Willy’s grandmother Empress Augusta understood all too well the difficulties faced by marrying a Hohenzollern prince. She cautioned Dona that Willy “needed much understanding love” and that it was “the serious and difficult task of his wife to help him understand the true nature of his high office.”
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The apparently warm, congenial atmosphere at Babelsberg concealed a deeply divided family whose troubled epicenter was Willy himself. As a child, he “came under the influence of his tyrannical German grandmother, the Empress Augusta, who spoiled him, bribed him and stimulated the development of that ‘terrible Prussian pride’ that his parents had hoped to discourage.”
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As Willy grew older, his German grandparents used him as a weapon against Fritz and Vicky especially, whom they disliked and distrusted for her liberal ideologies. By the time Dona met Willy, he was a deeply flawed individual caught in a perpetual love-hate relationship with his parents that would only get worse with time and, in the process, would suck Dona in until she was a part of the struggle herself. Those around Willy considered it a stroke of luck that he had found someone as loving and supportive as Dona. Georg Hinzpeter, his childhood tutor, elatedly wrote to Dona when he heard the news of their engagement: “May I tell Your Royal Highness how greatly relieved I went home, convinced that my dearly beloved problem child has had the inestimable fortune to unite himself for life with someone who understands him and sympathizes with his weaknesses.”
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Over the next few months, Willy carried out a trothplighting campaign through a daily exchange of letters. The bride-to-be, who was not normally given to public displays of affection, poured out a wellspring of emotions to her fiancé. She addressed him in a plethora of loving clichés like “heart’s treasure,” “Herzblatt,” or “Schatzi.” She ended her letters just as passionately. She closed one letter by writing, “I
so
look forward, my heart’s treasure, to the moment when I can kiss you again so ardently and look into your dear beautiful eyes.”
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During a visit to Cumberland Lodge after her engagement, Dona expressed her impatience to Willy at having to wait for her wedding.

I thank you with my whole heart for your last 2 letters … I have kissed them instead of you, for you wrote me so many loving and kind things that my longing for you became all the greater. I too cannot
express
how I am looking forward to the moment when after all the ceremonies we are
completely
alone with each other and I can flee into your arms after all the turmoil & excitement. It will truly be a happy feeling. And to obey, it will probably not be so bad, my heart’s treasure?
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Leading up to her wedding, Dona could not contain her excitement. In one of her last letters to Willy before becoming his wife, she wrote, “Your sweet words did me such good that it was as if you gazed into my heart and had discovered the longing which so completely and especially fills my heart at this time in particular.”
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Willy was just as anxious as Dona was for the wedding day to approach. Shortly before the big day, he wrote to one of his aunts, “I hope with God’s help together with the incomparable Princess to make a Christian and good house like the one I see and revere of my grandparents.”
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On Saturday, February 26, 1881, Dona made her triumphant entry into Germany’s capital. The procession in the streets of Berlin to welcome the princess proved to be a brilliant imperial pageant watched by tens of thousands of clamoring spectators. The black-and-white Prussian flag with its black crowned eagle decorated the buildings along Unter den Linden. The bride was preceded by unending lines of military officers, troops, and officials marching down Berlin’s main thoroughfare, led by the city’s master butchers as part of an ancient tradition. Next came the imperial carriage carrying Dona and Vicky, which was resplendently covered with gold and glass and drawn by horses dressed in the Prussian military livery. The smiling bride-to-be graciously waved to her future subjects, emanating a youthful enthusiasm that belied the fact that she was freezing cold wearing a dress that left her shoulders uncovered—a piece of traditional etiquette demanded by the uncompromising Prussian court. Behind Dona and Vicky’s carriage was Willy on horseback, dressed as a Captain of the Bodyguard. As they passed through the Brandenburg Gate, white doves were released from atop the monument as a seventy-two-gun salute boomed across the winter sky. The royal family made their way to Berlin’s primary palace, the Stadtschloss, with its awe-inspiring colonnaded grand entrance built beneath an equally impressive Romanesque dome. Waiting to welcome Dona when she arrived at the palace at 3:00 p.m. was the emperor, Fritz, and a full military honor guard. On entering, everyone signed the final marriage contract between the bride and groom. That night, celebrations took place “throughout the city, and dense joyous crowds paraded the streets until a late hour.”
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Few countries could match the magnificence of the welcome that Germany extended for the woman who would become its last empress.

The next day, Sunday, February 27, 1881, Princess Augusta Victoria became the first of the four special women to marry. It was only the third time in history that a Prussian prince had married a member of the House of Schleswig-Holstein. Breaking with the tradition of many other Hohenzollern weddings, Willy and Dona were married in the marble chapel of the Stadtschloss. A mustachioed pastor performed the solemn, extraordinarily complex Lutheran service, which lasted six interminable hours. During the nuptial sermon, the pastor told the young couple, “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”
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These would be three qualities Dona would carry with her always. Because of the chapel’s relatively small size, hundreds of guests stood in the palace’s other gilded halls awaiting the conclusion of the ceremony. As Willy took his vows, he turned to his grandfather, Wilhelm I, and made the traditional bow, as if to ask the old emperor one last time for his permission to marry. Dona wore a dress of gold-and-light-blue fabric with diamonds adorning her head and neck; her train was so long that it had to be carried by six bridesmaids. Vicky happily reported to Queen Victoria that “Dona looked charming and everyone was taken with her sweetness and grace.”
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At the crown princess’s request, the wedding reception included a massive English wedding cake surrounded by orange blossoms.

The day ended with the spectacular
Fackeltanz
, a torchlight dance performed at Prussian royal weddings that could only be danced by the bride and men with the style of Royal Highness or higher. As the grand hall was bathed in blazing reds and oranges, Dona danced with her new father-in-law, Fritz, while pages held aloft glowing candles set in silver candelabras. The only person who did not seem to bubble over that day was the groom. Willy’s diary entry was simple and nondescript: “I was married to-day in the chapel of the Castle. We shall settle in Potsdam, where I am to continue my service in the Hussars of the Guards.”
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The nuptial festivities in Berlin lasted for days. On Monday, February 28 Dona and Willy made their first public appearance together as husband and wife during a carriage ride through Berlin. Along the entire route, crowds of people clamored for a glimpse of the newlyweds. For Dona, a woman so unused to being the center of attention, these were heady days. But through it all, the new princess of Prussia was radiant, smiling, and genuinely enthusiastic about everything she did and everyone she met. This exuberance was an asset to Dona immediately after her wedding. During the first week of March, she and Willy received the more than two hundred royal deputations that had come to Berlin for their wedding, including Willy’s maternal uncles, the Prince of Wales, the Grand Duke of Hesse, and the Duke of Edinburgh; his great-uncle the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha; and the king and queen of Saxony. These audiences were held for several reasons. Etiquette demanded that these senior members of reigning families be properly received; many of them were related to the groom, bride, or both; and it was also intended to give Dona her first taste of life in Prussia.

The Prussia of the 1880s in which Dona went to live was a kingdom that Vicky described as full of “thorny people … with their sharp tongues [and] their cutting sarcasm about everybody and everything.”
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Thankfully for Dona, her new home was not the intrigue-ridden Berlin but the city of Potsdam, almost fifteen miles away. Potsdam was often called the Windsor of Prussia for its magnificent royal residences. Poultney Bigelow, a childhood friend of Willy’s, remembered it as “a wilderness of palaces, barracks, fountains, temples, [and] esplanades with innumerable marble divinities waving their naked arms and legs as though begging in vain for warm clothes in the damp and cold of the Brandenburg swamps.”
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Potsdam’s main attraction was the awe-inspiring Neues Palais. Used by Willy’s parents as their official residence, it was built by Frederick the Great in 1763 to impress his enemies. It was more than three stories tall and contained over two hundred rooms, multiple gathering halls, and a theater. The suites were filled with ornate silver furniture, silk tapestries, and Savonnerie carpets. Keeping with his unpredictable personality, once Frederick the Great completed the palace, he declared it to be an architectural monstrosity and refused to ever live there. Most people who visited it agreed that it was a cavernous old building that was meant to do little more than impress, which was evidenced by the fact that it exited out onto a military parade ground on the western side of Sanssouci Park.

Located nearby was the less imposing but equally beautiful Marble Palace, which was set aside for Willy and Dona. They spent almost all their time here in the first years after their wedding, since they were given no other official residences—the only accommodations they had outside Potsdam were a few austere, unfurnished rooms at the Stadtschloss in Berlin. For Dona, the Marble Palace was more than commodious. The palace, nestled on the shore of the Heiligen Sea, derived its name from its interior design. Its rooms were decorated with black-and-white marble floors, statues, and columns stretching high to its frescoed ceilings painted in the neoclassical style that was popular in nineteenth-century Germany. Considered warm and intimate by Prussian standards, the palace actually had working bathrooms and limited plumbing, which were added in a recent renovation. There were few royal residences in Germany that were equipped with modern amenities. In most castles and palaces, the carpets were threadbare, floors were dirty, and lavatories were few and far between. Princess Marie Louise of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, Dona and Willy’s mutual cousin, wrote about the poor living conditions: “It is very hard to convey to English readers the medieval conditions in which people in our state of life lived in Germany.”
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Unlike the close family atmospheres enjoyed by the Teck and Hesse families, the Hohenzollerns were rife with discord. Nowhere was the contrast more evident between the loving family ties of May and Alix’s intimate families and Dona and the Hohenzollerns than following the latter’s wedding in 1881. One woman in particular made herself the bane of Dona’s existence for the first few years of her married life. She was none other than Willy’s eldest sister, Charlotte (“Charly”).

For most of her adult life, Charly lived in a constant state of manic frenzy. She suffered violent moods swings and acute health problems that baffled her doctors. She outlined her symptoms to the world-renowned physician Dr. Ernest Schweninger. “My nerves are in shreds, although my appearance does not show it,” she wrote. “But a terrible headache on one side & dizziness on the left side
so
depress [
sic
] me, & completely irregular feelings of malaise, with a rash & itching.”
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Most historians now agree that Charly suffered from a disease she inherited from Queen Victoria known as porphyria. The disease, which—like hemophilia—is genetic but is suffered by both men and women, is believed to be responsible for driving Charly’s great-great-grandfather—King George III—mad. And when Dona married into the Hohenzollerns in 1881 by becoming Willy’s wife, it brought out the worst in Charly, sending her unstable personality soaring to new heights. She resented Dona for being “silent, barely communicative and very shy.”
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Charly’s venomous personality grew worse when she married Prince Bernard of Saxe-Meiningen in 1878. He was brutal in his assessment of Dona. He became something of a polemicist toward her, claiming she was stupid, tactless, and virtually illiterate compared to the modern, fashionable lifestyle he and his wife shared.