In Europe (19 page)
Authors: Geert Mak
At the time, Nicolson was an advisor to the Big Three: Great Britain, France and America. Yet he considered the Treaty of Versailles unworthy of the paper on which it was written. At Sissinghurst that afternoon, his son, Nigel Nicolson, had told me that his father had immediately foreseen the gravest trouble: the final negotiations had been raced through much too speedily, and the Germans, of course, had not been consulted at all. ‘In one letter to my mother he wrote: “So I went in. There were Wilson and Lloyd George and Clemenceau with their armchairs drawn close over my map on the hearth rug … It is appalling that these ignorant and irresponsible men should be cutting [Asia Minor] to bits as if they were dividing a cake. And with no one there except me …”’
At first, however, all those young diplomats had been full of high hopes. Their thinking was deeply influenced by the magazine
New Europe
, they dreamed of a ‘new Greece’ and a ‘new Poland’, they wanted to break with the old Europe. ‘Bias there was, and prejudice,’ Harold Nicolson wrote later. ‘But they proceed, not from any revengeful desire to subju-gate and penalise our late enemies, but from a fervent aspiration to create and fortify the new nations whom we regarded, with maternal instinct, as the justification of our sufferings and of our victory.’
The Paris peace conference, held between January and June 1919, was a fascinating event for all concerned: three world leaders who gathered for six months, along with the representatives of almost thirty nations, to establish a new European order and new borders in Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans, who created a new Poland, who granted independence to the Baltic States, who amputated whole sections of Germany and Hungary. One out of every eight Germans became the subject of a hitherto foreign power. With the Treaty of Trianon (1920), Hungary lost two thirds of its territory and a third of its population. For decades, the trauma of Trianon would dominate Hungarian politics.
The world leaders were aware, at least partly, of the problem they were creating: ethnic diversity, particularly in Central Europe, was so complex that every line they drew on the map produced a new national minority. ‘People’ and ‘nation’ were rarely one. That was why they stipulated that all new governments, if they wished to be recognised as such, were to sign a treaty committing themselves to guaranteeing their minorities
certain rights. Those rights were to be confirmed in the newly established League of Nations, an organisation designed to permanently safeguard against the kind of escalation seen in 1914.
Those minorities accounted for thirty-five million Europeans in all. The decisions made at Versailles affected at least a quarter of the population of Central and Eastern Europe. Here was where the old scores were settled, boundaries drawn, nations moulded, minorities formed and the demons released which were to dominate Europe for the rest of the century:
A few excerpts from Nicolson's 1919 diary:
Friday, 7 February
Spent most of the day tracing Rumanian and Czech frontiers with Charles Seymour of the US delegation. There are only a few points at which we differ.
Sunday, 2 March
Dine with Princess Soutzo at the Ritz – a swell affair … Marcel Proust and Abel Bonnard … there as well. Proust is white, unshaven, grubby, slip-faced. He puts his fur coat on afterwards and sits hunched there in white kid gloves. Two cups of black coffee he has, with chunks of sugar. Yet in his talk there is no affectation. He asks me questions. Will I please tell him how the committees work? I say: ‘Well, we generally meet at 10.0, there are secretaries behind …’ ‘
Mais non, mais non
, you are going too fast. Start anew. You take a car to the delegation. You get out at the Quai d'Orsay. You walk up the steps. You enter the Great Hall. And then? With more precision, dear sir, more precision.’ So I tell him everything. The sham cordiality of it all: the handshakes: the maps: the rustle of papers: the tea in the next room: the macaroons. He listens enthralled, interrupting from time to time: ‘But with more precision, dear sir, do not go too fast.’
Saturday, 8 March
Very tired, dispirited and uneasy.
Are
we making a good peace? Are we? Are we? There was a very gloomy telegram in from [General]
Plumer. He begs us to feed Germany. Says our troops cannot stand spectacle of starving children.
Thursday, 3 April
Arrive Vienna at about 10.0 a.m. Allen and I walk to the embassy, where our mission is in residence. The town has an unkempt appearance: paper lying about: the grass plots round the statues are strewn with litter: many windows broken and repaired by boards nailed up. The people in the streets are dejected and ill-dressed: they stare at us in astonishment. And indeed we are a funny sight, when viewed in a bunch like that … I feel that my plump pink face is an insult to these wretched people.
Tuesday, 13 May
To President Wilson's house … The door opens and Hankey tells me to come in. A heavily furnished study with my huge map on the carpet. Bending over it (bubble, bubble, toil and trouble) are Clemenceau, Lloyd George and President Wilson. They have pulled up armchairs and crouch low over the map. Lloyd George says – genial, always – ‘Now, Nicolson, listen with all your ears.’ He then proceeds to expound the agreement which they have reached. I make certain minor suggestions, plus a caveat that they are putting Konia in the Italian Zone. I also point out that they are cutting the Baghdad railway. This is brushed aside. President Wilson says: “And what about the Islands?’ ‘They are,’ I answer firmly, ‘Greek islands, Mr. President.’ ‘Then they should go to Greece?’ Harold Nicolson: ‘Rath
er
!’ President Wilson: ‘Rat
HER
!’ …
It is immoral and impracticable. But I obey my orders … Nearly dead with fatigue and indignation.
Wednesday, 28 May
Have been working like a little beaver to prevent the Austrian peace treaty from being as rotten as the German. The more I read the latter, the sicker it makes me. The great crime is in the reparation clauses, which were drawn up solely to please the House of Commons, and which are quite impossible to execute. If I were the
Germans, I shouldn't sign for a moment. You see it gives them
no
hope whatsoever, either now or in the future.
Sunday, 8 June
There is not a single person among the younger people here who is not unhappy and disappointed at the terms. The only people who approve are the old fire-eaters.
Finally, the day of the signing at Versailles itself arrives: 28 June, 1919. Harold Nicolson described the genial conversation in the Hall of Mirrors. ‘It is, as always on such occasions, like water running into a tin bath.’
The German delegation, consisting of two men, was announced. The silence was oppressive. Their footsteps creaked on the parquet. They were deathly pale. They entered with eyes fixed on the ceiling, but there too, I see now, they found only humiliation. The entire ceiling is covered with scenes of French victory, of routed Dutchmen and Prussians, of proud French kings, their enemies grovelling in the dust at their feet.
‘It has all been terrible. To bed, sick of life.’
Doorn
‘
I WAS, UNTIL MY RETIREMENT, A MANUFACTURER OF COLOURINGS
and flavourings. Queen Victoria was my great-great-grandmother, Kaiser Wilhelm II was my grandfather. We live here, close to Hanover, in a villa to which we gradually added more wings as the children came along. As you can see: a nice sitting room, a dining room, a fine house. Yes, those royal portraits came with the inheritance. The exact relation? I'm the fourth son of Prince Oscar. Oscar was the fifth son of Kaiser Wilhelm II. I'm a prince, yes, a Prussian prince.
‘Did I notice the change? I had an absolutely wonderful childhood at Potsdam, I went to school there, and after that I joined the army, the cavalry, because I was crazy about horses. That was in December 1939. The war had already begun.
‘My oldest brother Oscar was killed almost immediately. Shortly afterwards my cousin Wilhelm, the crown prince's eldest son, died as well. They organised a huge funeral for him at Potsdam, thousands of people attended. After that all of the kaiser's descendants were brought back from the front, including me. The Nazis did not want another demonstration of imperial loyalty like that. In 1943 we were all actually discharged from military service. The grounds given were: unsuited, due to international family ties. After the war I wanted to attend university, but the British were having none of it. Once again, it was those ‘international family ties’.
‘In the long run, through a friend, I found a position at a plant for colourings and flavourings, and together we were able to build that company into an international firm with twenty-two subsidiaries. Later on I'll be picking up my grandchildren at the station in Göttingen. No, I'm doing quite well, thank you.
‘The last German emperor, in other words, was my grandfather. From the time I was very young we always spent a week or two each summer at Doorn. He was a true grandfather. He had the special gift of being able to make every grandchild feel that he or she was his favourite. Our life at home was quite spartan, so we hugely enjoyed all that lovely Dutch food he served us. He was the one who introduced us to art and literature. He was interested in everything. As children, we were amazed by that.
‘I knew him, in other words, as a very different man from the one you read about in the history books. He probably mellowed as he grew older as well; in any case I never heard him speak an unfriendly word to anyone.
‘At first, living at Doorn was extremely difficult for him. The Dutch sheltered and protected him quite chivalrously, but he had fallen from the highest heights to the lowest depths, psychologically as well. Sometime you should read what was written about him at his silver jubilee, and then what they all said about him after the war. When a system of government as huge as that collapses, with everything and everyone in it who bore any responsibility, then the first reaction is to put the blame on the person who was at the top. In this case, that was my grandfather.
‘Back then there was also all that pomp and circumstance. They held that against him too. Every period, of course, has its own style – those long-winded communist diatribes from the days of the DDR wouldn't be tolerated any more either – so a lot of it had to do with the spirit of the times. At the same time, my grandfather was truly a man of broad interests. Technical things, scientific discoveries, educational reform, theatre, art, he was engrossed by all of that. Perhaps his interests were a bit too broad. Altogether, in my view, that gave him a certain ambivalence. He saw himself as an heir to the old Prussian rulers, but in actual fact he was much more a representative of the modern Germany, and naturally that created a certain tension.
‘The way I see it, the course of events leading up to the First World War had something fateful to it. No single European at that time could have imagined that out of all those little German states, a modern super-power would emerge so quickly. That wasn't particularly pleasant for all the surrounding countries, especially when that new Germany began
behaving like the nouveau riche. You're right, if Germany had shown a little more caution, it would all have turned out differently.
‘I still feel quite a strong bond with my grandfather. These days I see many things differently, but I always try to place his actions in the context of the day in which he lived. You see, the German Empire created in 1871 still had to reach maturity, it still had to adopt a whole new form. Before that, Germany was a quilt of smaller and larger princedoms, and in fact they were not at all keen about becoming united. Furthermore, there was a deep, deep chasm between Protestants and Catholics, and you had the extremely repressive Socialist Act as well, with all the struggle associated with that. Still, that empire survived the First World War, the victors allowed it to go on existing, it survived the Second World War, and today that unity is recognised by virtually all Germans.
‘The whole process took place in the space of only two or three generations, during the lifetimes of my grandfather, my father and I. So yes, I feel a part of it, just as I feel an affinity with those who live in what was once the DDR. I often think my generation, the generation which lived through and survived the Third Reich, we are probably the ones who understand best what the people in the DDR went through. We understand how a simple individual has to keep himself going under an authoritarian regime like that. I can understand them much better than my children's generation. They've never known anything but freedom.
‘Once again, you can't judge people outside the context of the age in which they live. Someone in my mother's family, for example, was deeply involved in the plot against Hitler on 20 July, 1944. He was arrested and hanged. But still, in the late 1920s that same man had been such a wild-eyed Nazi that my father refused to allow him to enter our home. We found out much too late that he had changed from a fanatical supporter to a vehement opponent. And I myself, if I hadn't had my background at home, I wonder whether I would not have become a Nazi too, in 1933, during the so-called ‘national rebirth’. All I can do is hope that, like that distant cousin of mine, I would have had the courage later to turn actively against that regime. But there weren't many like him.