1913 Read online

  As in every year, national celebrations greeted the Kaiser’s birthday on 27 January. In Berlin, the event was marked by a Lustspiel at the Opera House, under the Kaiser’s personal direction. (Wilhelm rated himself as a music critic, as well as a connoisseur of painting and sculpture in general, frequently intervening when the mood took him, or expatiating on the public role of art itself.) Three days later the royal palace issued the following press release:

  My birthday has in this year introduced a series of commemorations which once again bring alive before us the events of the national uprising of Prussia one hundred years ago. May this remembrance of the past always help to remind us in the present what we owe the Fatherland and incite us to apply the same loyalty, devotion, and unity in those tasks Providence presents to our generation just like our forefathers one hundred years ago.40

  Through the year, the Kaiser’s celebrations took him all across Germany: to Kelheim in Bavaria, where the rallying of Bavaria to the standard of Germany was celebrated (albeit historically remastered, and viewed through the prism of the Bavarian royal family rather than any broader national awakening). In October he travelled to Leipzig, where he unveiled the Battle of the Nations monument (and missed out on the industrial fair being held in the city at the same time, much to the disappointment of its local industrial notables). In Berlin, the Kaiser had not only the royal wedding in May to contend with, but the opening of the Grunewald Olympic Stadium in June (at which the Kaiser’s entourage attempted to engineer a rather more popular festival than that created by the standard military parades). Later that same month the Kaiser oversaw the Festzug der Innungen, a positively anti-modern parade of Berlin’s various medieval guilds paying homage to the monarch, criticised as a ‘medieval masquerade’ in the socialist press.41 Some no doubt liked the show, although the military turnout made it hard to get close to any of the action. Many found such celebrations pompous, and rather divorced from the modern Germany in which they lived. Far from arresting the Kaiser’s diminishing appeal, therefore, the celebrations of 1913 perhaps accelerated it.

  The Belgian ambassador recalled the thaler coins – worth three marks – issued for the celebration. On one face of the commemorative coin the king was depicted on horseback with soldiers brandishing their swords and guns, ‘Mit Gott für König und Vaterland’ – ‘With God for King and Fatherland’ – printed below the scene, and above it, ‘Der König rief und Alle, Alle kamen’ – ‘The King called and everyone came’.42 On the reverse of the coin, an eagle towered victoriously over a serpent, and a device underneath read ‘Gott mit Uns!’ – ‘God with us!’ The words referred to 1813 when, according to the mythology proclaimed a century later, the Prussian king had called on his people to defend Prussia, and they had responded to a man (the historical record was rather different, but this was to quibble). The seeds of German unity lay in royal initiative as much as in the political machinations of Bismarck, such coins suggested.

  A hundred years later the notion of a warrior king, a unifier of the nation, and a magnifier of its prestige, certainly appealed to Kaiser Wilhelm’s martial side. It was Wilhelm who had declared that he and the army were made for each other. He appreciated its pomp, and its hierarchy – with himself, of course, at the summit. He gloried in the prospect of a new Imperial Navy with which to impress his English cousins (despite the obvious fears this raised in London). He spoke encouragingly of Germany’s Weltpolitik – the natural corollary of Germany’s commercial reach, as he saw it – keenly supportive of the schemes of his foreign office to extend German influence in the Middle East through the construction of the Berlin–Baghdad railway and his country’s alliance with the Ottoman Empire. He never missed an opportunity to show off his military knowledge and inclinations: the British Prince of Wales recalled visiting Wilhelm in his office in 1913 and finding that he sat at his desk not in a chair, but in a military saddle, claiming that this was more conducive to ‘clear, concise thinking’, before whisking the young Prince off to the opera in a fast car, wearing a deep green uniform with a gilt hunting dagger and a plumed hat.43 More importantly, the Kaiser supported a further expansion of the German army in 1913, the expansion which sparked off the French extension of military service from two to three years. Occasionally he expressed dark expectations of a coming clash between Teuton and Slav.

  But alongside the image of Kaiser Wilhelm as the warrior – albeit a chocolate-box warrior – there was the image of Wilhelm as a peacemaker. Both competed in the public mind, both nationally and internationally. And why not? After all, by 1913 the Kaiser had overseen not just twenty-five years of German economic expansion, but twenty-five years of continuous peace. Despite the odd flare-up, things had never come to war, and Germany had always stepped back from the brink (much to the chagrin of nationalists and militarists who thus saw the Kaiser as weak and ineffectual, incapable of being a true Prussian leader). The language of international pacifism was German. In 1913 the Kaiser intervened forcefully with Vienna to dissuade Austria-Hungary from getting more deeply involved in the Balkan mêlée, though some in Vienna wanted to use the opportunity of an ongoing Balkan war to discipline Serbia and prevent it from becoming either a magnet for its own Slav population, or too strong a power on its southern flank. The Kaiser saw himself as the master of European diplomacy, attempting to make and break alliances right and left, although his diplomats might privately differ from such a warm assessment.

  In 1911 the president of the University of California at Berkeley, Germanist Benjamin Ide Wheeler, had nominated Kaiser Wilhelm II for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1913, a spate of articles in Germany and abroad labelled him the Friedenskaiser, ‘Emperor of peace’. In June that year, the New York Times published a long article by Alfred Fried, founder of the German peace movement, who wrote:

  His glory as a man of peace, great enough now, will become greater, and his wish to figure in history as a hero of peace will be fulfilled. And historians of the future, in a position to appreciate fully this great and restless epoch through which we are passing … such historians will speak of Wilhelm II as the compelling force in that process of change and will bestow upon him the title of ‘The Great Conciliator’.44

  ROME

  The Pope’s Aeroplane

  Most European thoughts tended to Berlin when they considered Europe’s rising powers in 1913. Italy was rather the country of the passeggiata and the dolce far niente, a playground for the wealthy and artistically minded, who allied themselves with the impecunious Italian aristocracy, renting a distressed palazzo for less than a small house in Grunewald, or spending a pleasant month in Venice amongst Europe’s finer sort. Italy was thought picturesque and poor, equal charm residing in both qualities, the southern European anti-thesis to northern European wealth and dynamism.

  In the patronising northern European formulation, Italy was an aesthetic experience, a living museum. For such travellers Florence was the essential destination to be visited, at least as much as Rome. Florence, after all, was the city of Dante Alighieri and the Medici chapel, and the city of the Renaissance. Italy was a showcase of natural and human beauty, a land where opera – the most famous popular composers of the time were Italian – was simply a natural expression of life. ‘I do believe that Italy really purifies and ennobles all who visit her’, says Philip Herriton in E. M. Forster’s novel Where Angels Fear to Tread, ‘she is the school as well as the playground of the world’.1 Such sweeping statements were typical of north Europeans intoxicated by Italy – just as Goethe had been more than a hundred years before. It was against these views of Italy that Italian Futurists such as Filippo Marinetti so consciously rebelled. ‘It is in Italy that we are issuing this manifesto of ruinous and incendiary violence’, wrote Marinetti in 1909, ‘because we want to deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides and antiquaries’.2

  What pretty foreign accounts of Italy’s art and architecture tended to overlook was the country’s contemporary power.
While Italy was certainly the least of the continental great powers beside Germany, France, Austria-Hungary and the Russian Empire, the Kingdom of Italy nonetheless sought her place amongst them. True, Italy had only been unified under the royal House of Savoy in 1861, and the nation was not yet fully forged. Some Neapolitans and Sicilians might feel stronger attachment to their region and to their church than they did to the Kingdom of Italy, perceived largely as an extension of the northern Kingdom of Piedmont, just as the Milanese looked down on their southern compatriots as being as anciently primitive as the populations of north Africa over whom they aspired to rule. ‘North and south are two nations’, wrote a socialist commentator, ‘and one, the most wretched, is fleeing across the seas’, emigrating permanently or seasonally to America or to Argentina.3 True also, that essentially all of Italy’s industry – such as the Fabbrica Italiana Automobili di Torino, or Pirelli – was in the north. Much of the rest of the country was still an agricultural land of peasants, many of them illiterate. ‘In a place like this’, writes one of Forster’s characters, ‘it seems impossible that the middle ages have passed away’.4

  Yet Italy was also becoming a modern, imperial European nation-state. Recently introduced electoral laws extended the vote to over eight million Italians in the election of 1913, more than double the previous electorate (as in France, female suffrage was not granted until much later). Taking aim at those of his fellow northern Europeans who persisted in seeing in Italy a polity of little importance, underdeveloped and chaotic, the English writer Richard Bagot wrote:

  I often have occasion to wonder whether my compatriots, who visit the country for a few weeks or months, realise, even to the most superficial degree, the true significance of what they see all around them, and whether they have the remotest conception of what has been accomplished in Italy in the course of the last fifty years. I imagine, from the remarks and criticisms I so frequently hear made by them, that they neither realise the one nor possess the other … They forget that if Rome was not built in a day, neither was England; and they do not reflect that it is entirely unfair, and not a little absurd, to judge a people that has fifty years of national life by the standards rightly appertaining to a people which lives under an organisation that has needed nearly twenty times as long a period in which to attain to its actual development.5

  Perhaps, he hinted, they preferred to see in Italy a country forever archaic and forever weak, just as they uttered ‘indignant wails over vandalisms daily perpetrated by the modern Romans’, or wrote letters to the London Times, whenever ‘some ancient piece of building is removed in order to meet the ever-increasing exigencies of a great city such as Rome is rapidly becoming’.6

  In January 1913, 10,000 Italian troops marched through Rome fresh from a colonial campaign, part of an army close in size to that of Britain. Italy had its first dreadnought, the Dante Alighieri, part of a navy which might tip the balance of power one way or the other in the Mediterranean. Italy had African colonies: Eritrea, in the Horn of Africa, and now Libya, which had been acquired from the Ottoman Empire in a small and superficially victorious war the previous year – the first conflict in which aeroplanes were used, mostly for reconnaissance but also, in a sortie led by Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti, to drop bombs on Ottoman troops.7 Filippo Marinetti, brought up in Alexandria and suckled by a Sudanese wet nurse as a baby, celebrated the war’s violence as reconnecting Italy with the energies of ‘barbarian’ Africa, while affirming the country’s modern élan.8 Just as the Franco-Prussian War had helped weld Germany into a single political unit, so the war in Libya was a crucible for the remaking of Italy and Italians, argued Giovanni Pascoli, a well-known Italian poet:

  Whoever wishes to know what [Italy] is now, behold its army and its navy … Land, sea and sky, mountains and plains, peninsula and islands are perfectly fused. The fair-skinned solemn Alpine soldier fights beside the slim dark Sicilian, the tall Lombard grenadier rubs shoulders with the short lean Sardinian fusilier … Run your eye over the lists of the glorious dead, and wounded – who rejoice in their radiant wounds: you will find yourself remembering and revising the geography of what was, but a short time ago, just a geographical expression … Oh, you blessed men who have died for the fatherland! … Fifty years ago Italy was made. On the sacred fiftieth anniversary … you have proved that Italians too have been made.9

  Such writers looked scornfully upon Italietta – the notion of a quiet little Italy, comfortably bourgeois, but essentially picturesque – the image of the country associated with its Prime Minister, Giovanni Giolitti. Rather, they pictured a glorious future for Italy, a country respected by its European peers, and a suitable inheritor of the still-visible past of the Roman Empire.

  Such grandiose ideas of the country’s national destiny fed additional colonial aspirations for Italy in Africa, particularly Ethiopia, from which the Italian army had been ingloriously turned back at the Battle of Adowa in 1896. They stoked Italian interest in the Balkans, where some Italians dreamed of a renewed zone of Italian influence along the Adriatic. And just as some nationalist French had revanchist ambitions towards Alsace and Lorraine, so some extreme Italian nationalists demanded their government act to return the once Italian, but now French, city of Nice to the fatherland, and claim Italian-speaking Trieste and Tyrol from Austria-Hungary, a nominal Italian ally. The inconvenient fact that the people of Nice had actually voted to stick with France in a referendum fifty years earlier was forgotten. The reality that neither France nor Austria-Hungary was likely to concede territory without a fight was glossed over. Perhaps it did not matter. After all, a fight was precisely what some Italians wanted. Marinetti referred to Trieste as ‘notre belle poudrière’ – ‘our beautiful gunpowder keg’.10

  Thus while Italy was not on the main line of European diplomacy in 1913, she could not be ignored in Balkan diplomacy, nor discounted in wider calculations of European power. Rome was granted the status of a city to which the great powers now accorded a full embassy, a mark of regained status on the diplomatic circuit. She could no longer be left happily to tourists, who would provide no more annoyance than the occasional consular enquiry over the whereabouts of an errant husband or a stolen bag. Italy would have to be taken seriously.

  If there was one city which had a greater claim on eternity than Paris it was surely Rome. Here the Roman empire had risen and fallen, now visible mostly in the city’s plentiful ruins, lying within the Passeggiata Archeologica in the centre of the city. After the fall of Rome, the city had declined, and then found a new role as the intermittent home of the papacy, capital of the Papal States, and seat of the Roman Catholic Church. It had become a place of priests and nuns, churches and monasteries, its population a fraction of what it had been at the height of empire, industry discouraged, and its Jews corralled into a ghetto. Now, however, Rome was the capital of the young Italian kingdom, liberal and anti-clerical, with bureaucrats of the new state taking up residence in the city. From a population of less than 200,000 in 1861, by 1913 Rome numbered half a million or more: less than either Milan or Naples, a fraction of that of London, Paris or Berlin, but impressive nonetheless. Unlike Paris, which had a reputation to maintain, and Berlin, which had a desperate need to show it had arrived, Rome was a city recovering its rank.

  Although the Kingdom of Italy had been proclaimed in 1861 – and ‘Rome or death’ had been Giuseppe Garibaldi’s cry for the Risorgimento, which unified Italy through war – Rome had only been incorporated into the kingdom a decade later. It was in 1870, when the French Emperor Napoleon III was forced to remove the garrison which had been protecting the Pope’s temporal power in order to defend France itself, that the opportunity arose for the Italian army to occupy Rome. In the following decades projects were conceived, under the title of ‘Roma Capitale’, for the capital of the Kingdom of Italy to be transformed from a papal enclave into a city that would bear comparison to other European capitals. Romanità – the spirit of ancient Rome – was to be reborn, and Italy li
fted from the pages of books of archaeology and Baedeker guides to the pages of world history of the twentieth century, glorying in both Italy’s past and her future.11

  Old and new. The first flight over the Vatican in Rome in 1911.

  In June 1911, the fiftieth anniversary of the proclamation of a united Italy reached its climax with the official inauguration of a huge and still unfinished marble and blinding-white limestone monument to Vittorio Emanuele, the king whose troops had occupied the city. Reaching into the Roman heavens, the monument, designed by Italian architect Giuseppe Sacconi, raised an equestrian statue of Vittorio Emanuele above the goddess of Rome. Above them both, the sixteen regions of Italy were represented by sixteen figures apparelled in classical dress. The symbolism of the monument, harking both backwards to ancient Rome and suggesting Italy’s glorious future as a nation-state – without making reference to the church – was inescapable. Its location, on the Capitoline Hill from which the Roman Empire had once been ruled, expressed its ambition. It was to dominate Rome; buildings around it were moved in order to provide more impressive vistas to it, and to magnify its visual monumentality.12 It was called the ‘altar of the nation’, wilfully adopting a term imbued with religious meaning. Indeed, the monument physically hid a church, and it provided an alternative focal point to the dome of St Peter’s Basilica on the other side of the River Tiber. As if to confirm the liberal nature of the new Italy, events around the inauguration included a beauty contest in which 300 girls competed to be crowned ‘Queen of Rome’.13