Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires (48 page)

With a semiunified parliamentary voice calling for his abdication, Wilhelm fell into an emotional crisis. On November 17, Chancellor von Bülow hurried to Potsdam to meet with the emperor and empress. They awaited him on the terrace in front of the Neues Palais. As Bülow approached, Dona hurried to him first.

“Be really kind and gentle with the Emperor,” she whispered in his ear. “He is quite broken up.”

The next day, Wilhelm announced he was considering accepting the Reichstag’s call to abdicate. Frantic, Dona immediately sent for Bülow to find out whether or not he would pressure the emperor to abdicate. She received him on the ground floor at the Neues Palais, her eyes red from crying all night.

“Must the Emperor abdicate?” she desperately asked the chancellor. “Do you wish him to abdicate?” He assured the empress he would not and that abdication would not be necessary because “the storm had begun to abate,” thanks to his efforts in the Reichstag.
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The damage was already done. Overwhelmed, Wilhelm suffered a small nervous breakdown, collapsing on the floor of his office shortly after returning from a visit to Baden-Baden. One witness described the fifty-year-old emperor as being paralyzed by a “psychic [
sic
] and nervous depression.”
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In her diary, Dona wrote, “In November this year there arose very many difficult and serious political repercussions.… I went to Baden-Baden, found my husband very depressed and we returned to Potsdam together. Suffering from overwork and assailed by many mental conflicts at this, he fell ill.”
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This was not the first time Wilhelm suffered a nervous breakdown. When Count Leo von Caprivi resigned as German chancellor in 1894, the “shock of his resignation seems to have triggered a nervous collapse lasting some two weeks.”
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His breakdown in 1908 seems to have lasted of similar duration. For approximately two weeks, Crown Prince Willy took over much of his father’s responsibilities. The person who brought Wilhelm back from the depths of hopelessness was his wife. Dona guided and counseled her husband, urging him not to abdicate too rashly. Although the emperor soon abandoned any plans to do so, his self-esteem took a permanent blow. The crown prince recalled that Wilhelm “had lost his hope, and felt himself to be deserted by everybody; he was broken down by the catastrophe which had snatched the ground from beneath his feet; his self-confidence and his trust were shattered.”
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He was never quite the same after 1908 and required more support than ever from his patient wife. It would also not be his last nervous breakdown.

By the early 1910s, there was little doubt that the Prusso-German monarchy was struggling. Once the most fiercely monarchical people in Europe, the Germans—especially the Prussians—had become disillusioned not only with Wilhelm II but his sons and many others members of the royal family too. Dona and Sissy were exceptions. Muckraking newspapers in Berlin openly criticized the government’s antiquated system of taxes for weighing heavily on the average citizens and almost not at all on the aristocracy, rising food prices, and growing national debt thanks to Wilhelm’s exorbitant spending on the imperial navy. Between 1905 and 1913, some 2,226,000 workers went on strike “against the three-class franchise in Prussia.”
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In the hard-fought elections of 1912, the Far Left and the Catholic Center Party—both of which were polarized against the Hohenzollern monarchy—became the two largest parties in the Reichstag with a combined majority of 201 seats. Support for the Wilhelmine government was at an all-time low. Murmurs could be heard calling for an end to the reign of the Hohenzollerns.

Wilhelm II had not only alienated political leaders but other royals as well. By the time King George V ascended the throne, none of the several dozen royal families that made up Germany’s upper strata wanted anything to do with the Hohenzollerns. Nicholas II’s aunt Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna, who was originally from Mecklenburg-Schwerin, expressed her contempt for Wilhelm II: “I am only a Mecklenburger on one point: in my hatred for the Emperor William.
He
represents what I have been taught from my childhood to detest the most—the tyranny of the Hohenzollerns. Yes, it is the Hohenzollerns who have perverted, demoralized, degraded and humiliated Germany and gradually destroyed all her elements of idealism and generosity, refinement and charity.”
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It was a similar story with foreign dynasties. Wilhelm offended the king of Italy by making crude jokes about his “extraordinarily small” physique.
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In 1910, he nearly caused an international incident by playfully slapping King Ferdinand of the Bulgarians on the buttocks in public, who then promptly left Berlin “white-hot with hatred.” He reportedly struck Grand Duke Vladimir of Russia across the back with a field marshal’s baton.
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Even Wilhelm’s extended family loathed him. The Greek royal family despised the German emperor, who had gone out of his way to make things difficult for Greece in its recent war with Turkey, even though the country’s future queen was his own sister Sophie. His cousins Tsarina Alexandra and Crown Princess Marie of Romania detested his arrogance, immaturity, and condescension.

Some of these sentiments changed for the better in 1913 when Wilhelm and Dona’s daughter, Princess Victoria Louise (“Sissy”), became engaged to Prince Ernest Augustus of Hanover. The choice of the extravagantly wealthy prince from Hanover as a husband was a controversial one, given the years of enmity between the Hohenzollerns and the Hanovers. The conflict dated back decades to before the formation of the German Empire when Prussia annexed Hanover and deposed its king following the Austro-Prussian War. So when Sissy declared she wanted to marry the grandson of the last Hanoverian king, many hoped it would heal the rift between the two dynasties.

For most of her life, Sissy was a contradiction who had caused her mother much consternation. Like her grandmother Vicky, she was quite intelligent. When Sissy was young, Dona once wrote in her diary that she “interests herself a great deal in political events.”
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She had inherited the empress’s statelier qualities—her dignity, carriage, and grace. She had also inherited an imperious, willful streak from her father. She was one of those “girls who think that they know everything better than their elders, and who, under the pretext of being romantic, sometimes sacrifice considerable advantages for the sake of asserting themselves in opposition to their elders.”
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As the youngest child in a family of seven—and the only girl at that—she knew she was the center of attention and took great pains to have the entire court revolve around her. According to Crown Prince Willy, she was “the only one of us who succeeded in her childhood in gaining a snug place” in the emperor’s heart.
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One of Wilhelm II’s biographers described her as the emperor’s little “sunshine princess.”
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But it was her flippant attitude that caused fights between mother and daughter. When it came to her daughter, the “Empress had many an anxious moment.” Dona “had very decided opinions on propriety,” and as a result, “she often felt sincerely alarmed at the extremely modern spirit which her daughter displayed.”
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Sissy took a measure of delight in causing havoc, especially with her pious mother. She found an eager ally in her sister-in-law Cecilie. Once, when the latest fashions from Paris had arrived, Dona decried the impropriety of the short, slit skirts the women were wearing. Within a few days, Sissy and Cecilie horrified the empress when they walked into a room wearing the tightest, shortest skirts they could find. Though at times frustrated by these qualities in her daughter, Dona nonetheless understood them well. The princess was the only girl in a household of boys, and she was spoiled by a father who made clear his preference for his daughter over his sons. She was also the only person in the family, including the empress, who could influence her father with great ease. When Sissy informed her parents that she wanted to marry Ernest Augustus, Dona was overjoyed—and relieved—that she was settling down to a life of her own.

Victoria Louise and Ernest Augustus met in 1912 when the prince came to Berlin after his brother’s death in an automobile crash. The latter had been on his way to Denmark to attend the funeral of his uncle—King Frederick VIII—when his car skidded off the road near Nackel in Brandenburg. At the emperor’s insistence, his sons Willy and Eitel-Fritz were part of the honor guard that escorted the body to its final resting place. Ernest Augustus came to Berlin to meet with Wilhelm II and thank him for his gesture of sympathy in sending his sons. Dressed in his light-blue uniform of the Bavarian military, Ernest Augustus was invited to an audience with Dona, who was greatly impressed by him. “How nice it is to see a Bavarian uniform here,” she remarked. “It’s just like the one in which my father went to war in 1870.” The empress felt a certain affinity for Ernest Augustus and his family because—like her own—they had been dispossessed during Bismarck’s military expansion of Prussia. The greatest impression Ernest Augustus made was on Sissy, for whom it was “love at first sight.” He was equally smitten when he laid eyes on the emperor’s daughter. It took a number of months to overcome all the political issues—which were very similar to those faced by Dona when she married Wilhelm—and required the help of most of Sissy’s brothers and especially her sister-in-law Cecilie. When the betrothal finally became official, Dona was thrilled for her daughter. She wrote in her diary, “My child, her father, and I were radiantly happy.”
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After much deliberation, the wedding was set for May 1913.

Planning the marriage of the only daughter and youngest child of the reigning German emperor was steeped in etiquette. “During those weeks we were beset the whole time by people,” Sissy later wrote, “particularly by the ladies-in-waiting and Court officials. Everyone wanted to give advice concerning the Princess’s wedding.”
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As the mother of the bride, it fell to Dona to shoulder the responsibility of planning all the arrangements, but the inundation of unsolicited suggestions, corrections, and opinions was almost too much for the empress to bear. Ernest Augustus had great sympathy for her situation, both as a mother and a reigning consort. Before the wedding, he wrote the following to Sissy:

I’m sorry for your mother. Do try to get her to keep calm. I’m very angry with these ladies [of the court] for they are to blame for making her so nervous. When you consider that none of these women is married, how can they want to involve themselves in such affairs?… You know, I understand your mother perfectly. She naturally wants the best for you, but she is an Empress and wants to have you just as she is, but she forgets that she is still an Empress.
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In a gesture aimed at furthering the emperor’s belief in the success of international relations through personal diplomacy, he invited to the wedding King George V and Queen Mary, Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra, and almost all of his extended family. Wilhelm’s choice to invite his imperial counterparts was a natural one because, despite years of building tension between Germany and Russia and Britain, Ernest Augustus was a first cousin to both the king and the tsar.
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George wrote to Nicholas in April 1913, “May and I have accepted William’s kind invitation to be present at his daughter’s wedding next month. I also understand he has invited you and I trust that you may be able to come as it would give me the greatest pleasure to meet you there. I hope nothing will prevent this. Our best love to Alix and the children. Georgie.” The response Nicholas sent back was simple and to the point: “I’ll go if you go.”
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George and Mary were the first guests to arrive in Berlin in May 1913. Their arrival was treated with the greatest ceremony, since they were the most highly regarded, highest-ranking visitors. After being met at the train station by Wilhelm and Dona, they passed under the Brandenburg Gate, driving down Under den Linden in an “awe-inspiring” ceremony. For the remainder of the day, the zeppelin
Hansa
circled above imperial Germany’s capital. The next day, Nicholas and Alexandra arrived, accompanied by a hundred plainclothes police officers. “The arrival of all the wedding guests turned Berlin into a magnificent showcase, a display of Royalty rarely seen before,” Sissy recalled in her memoirs. “Masses of people gathered in the streets of the capital to witness the parade of princes. They had come from everywhere to line the route the wedding guests would pass, and the sight of the tremendous throng in Under den Linden Opera Place, and in front of the castle was indescribable.”
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