The Weimar Triangle (13 page)

“No,” Lina sighed. “One miscarriage, that’s all.”

“And now she got married again? The princess can’t be so young any more.”

“She is sixty-one. Seven years younger than His Majesty.”

“And who is His Majesty’s new brother-in-law?”Hanni tried to control the sarcasm in her voice. “Did he have to approve?”

“Oh, he would never have approved.” Lina nearly burst into tears. “The husband is a Russian nobody. His name is Alexander Zoubloff. Nobody knows anything about him. Except that he is
thirty-five
years younger than she.”

“Oh, that’s quite a lot,” Hanni observed.

“It certainly is.” Lina wiped a tear away with her apron. “Everybody in the village believes he’s after her money.”

“But why should she marry him?” I asked.

“Yes, that’s just it.” Lina began to sob. “She must have fallen in love with him.”

Unlike Princess Viktoria, Alexander Zoubloff was not hard to understand. He was an enterprising refugee from the Russian revolution who somehow managed to penetrate the fence without being shot and charmed the lady. She was a conventional princess, proud and dignified and well intentioned. Throughout the war she had been more sympathetic to the English side than to her own and her brother’s. But when she met her cousin King George V of England after the war, he told her it was a little too soon for them to become friends again. At the time, the yellow press in London was demanding the Kaiser be hanged.

Throughout the night I wrestled with the question of how this elderly lady could have fallen in love with this young Russian. Suddenly, early in the morning, a light went on in the back of my head.

It was not only the matter of Wilhelm’s father’s anti-Bismarck diaries that had enraged Wilhelm the day he assumed the throne in 1888 but also his mother’s support of her daughter Viktoria’s
— our
Viktoria’s
—
intention to marry the man she then loved, Alexander von Battenberg. She was in fact secretly engaged to him. Viktoria was seventeen at the time.

Two of Alexander’s brothers had already married granddaughters of Queen Victoria, so what could have been the objection? Surely not that Battenberg was an obscure town in the north of Hesse, the residence of the grand dukes of Hesse, and that no one who mattered had ever heard of Battenberg until Grand Duke Alexander of Hesse, whose sister was the wife of Tsar Alexander II, gave the name of Battenberg to his sons because they were the products of a morganatic marriage and could not carry their father’s title. They happened to be unusually gifted, good looking and, above all, good in choosing wives. Two of them married daughters of Queen Victoria. In one generation they moved to the centre of power. Of course it helped that they were nephews of the tsar.

Prince Alexander von Battenberg was a beautiful man with a full black beard. Unfortunately, the Congress of Berlin in 1878 had made him Prince of Bulgaria, in effect King of Bulgaria. Inevitably, he became fatally embroiled in Balkan politics. Both the Russians and the Prussians tried to use him. In 1886 he lost his throne because he had defied the tsar. For Bismarck, friendship with Russia was top priority. It was out of the question that a Prussian princess would marry a man who was in the tsar’s bad books. Never mind that the tsar’s wife was his aunt. In Bismarck’s mind it did not help that Alexander was also unusually well connected to the family of Wilhelm’s detestable mother.

My theory was that our princess Viktoria, at the age of sixty-one, fell in love with Alexander Zoubloff, because he reminded her of the only man she had ever loved and was not allowed to marry nearly forty years ago.

The marriage did not last long.

In 1917 Zoubloff had fled to Berlin, penniless, lived in asylums for the next year or two, became an extra at the UFA studios for a while for three marks a day, and washed dishes. I heard two versions of how he met the princess. One, she met him in a delicatessen as he looked longingly at cold cuts he could not afford, and she took pity on him. The other, more likely, a distant relative who, for some reason, knew him, introduced him to her in the Palais Schaumberg in Bonn. (She was, after all, the widow of Prince Adolf von Schaumberg-Lippe.)

News that they were going to get married was the juiciest society scandal of 1927. She received so many insulting letters that, according to the Berlin paper
8 Uhr Abendblatt,
she threatened legal action. She issued a statement that her marriage was “founded on a bond of comradeship [
Kameradschaftlichkeit
] and mutual respect.”

In the two years to come, he spent her and her late husband’s considerable fortune. Moreover, according to one report I saw, he also incurred such heavy debts that in October 1929, before she could divorce him, she had to auction off the Palais Schaumberg, including all its treasures. According to another report, the Palais Schaumburg was not her property at all but that of Prince Georg of Schaumburg-Lippe.

After the divorce he took a job as a waiter. The owner of his restaurant put a sign in the window: “Here you are served by the Kaiser’s brother-in-law.”

Princess Viktoria died soon after. Neither the Hohenzollerns nor the Schaumburg-Lippes agreed to have her interred in their respective family burial grounds. Her sister, Margarethe, arranged to have her put to rest in the chapel of the
Burg
Kronberg.

K
ARLI AND
T
OMMY

On Sunday Karli and Tommy joined us on our hike up the Altkönig, if not right up to the summit at least as far as the Fuchstanz. Hanni called it the Fox Trot. On the way up we sat down for a few minutes at the Viktoria Tempel to enjoy the view of Frankfurt and the Main valley, with the Odenwald hills in the distance. The weather was lovely.

The boys were fourteen and fifteen respectively and attended the Untertertia and Obertertia, grades ten and eleven, at the Goethe Gymnasium, in Frankfurt’s West End. It traced its proud history back over four hundred years. In the first two grades, the Sexta and Quinta, the boys took French; in the Untertertia and Obertertia they added Latin, and the Untersekunda, Greek. English was optional in the three upper grades, the Obersekunda, the Unterprima and the Oberprima. In history, in the lower grades, they studied the Sumerians, Assyrians, Babylonians and Egyptians, and later, at length, the Greeks and Romans. Later, the boys read Xenophon’s
Anabasis
in Greek and Caesar’s
Gallic War
s in Latin. In the upper grades, Homer in Greek and Horace and Virgil in Latin. Though there was an emphasis on the humanities, the teaching of science and math was also excellent. [Hans Bethe, the future Nobel laureate in physics, had entered the Goethe Gymnasium in 1915.] The students were socially mixed. Most came from middle class homes, often impoverished, but some were working class. Between five and ten per cent were Jewish. If you were a “dissident,” i.e., agnostic or atheist, you could play football in the schoolyard while others attended classes on their religion. But only few made use of this option.

On the façade of the Goethe Gymnasium was engraved in golden letters VITAE NON SCHOLAE DISCIMUS
—
we learn for life not for the school
—
an observation hotly disputed by the boys.

It had been my own high school twenty years ago.

At the Fuchstanz we could not believe our eyes when we saw, sitting at a wooden table outside the tavern, drinking beer with three boys and an older man, the unpredictable, choleric and occasionally tyrannical Professor Karl Hahn. He had been my teacher and was now the boys’. During the last year, they told me later, he often made fun of the League of Nations to which Germany had been admitted a year ago. He called it “that useless deaf old aunt in Geneva.”

He recognized me immediately.

I froze. So did Karli and Tommy.

“Herzberg!” he shouted, rising from his seat and stretching out his hand. “How good to see you. I keep reading you in the
Frankfurter Zeitung.
One mistake after another!”

I introduced Hanni. They shook hands. He presented his three students. His adult companion was the father of one of them. We chatted. It turned out that he had taken a group of ten boys to Rome during the Easter holidays, on a week’s tour of the antiquities. The three boys present were among them. At one point the man took me aside and whispered to me that Hahn had paid for his son’s expenses himself. He himself could not afford them.

“We stayed in Trastevere,” Hahn told me. “Do you know it? Our hotel was next door to Santa Maria. Probably the first church in Rome where mass was celebrated openly. Built by Pope Julius the First.”

“Three hundred thirty-seven to three hundred fifty-one,” one of the boys volunteered.

“Three hundred fifty-two,” Hahn corrected him sharply. “As every child knows.”

Suddenly something occurred to him.

“Geisel? Geisel?” he turned to me while Hanni was talking to her sons. “Did you say that was the lady’s name? Is she by any chance the wife of the scoundrel who wants to ruin our war memorials?”

“He is my friend,” I replied, happy that I did not have to be afraid of Hahn any longer but concerned that he might now punish the two Geisel boys for their father’s sins.

“You’ve always been an odd one, Herzberg,” he said, shaking his head in disapproval.

Hahn was still sporting the Kaiser’s mustache. He was the older step-brother of the famous physicist Otto Hahn, and had to be close to retirement age. Every old boy had stories to tell of Hahn’s bad temper but also about his flashes of unexpected good humour, his devotion to his students, his old-fashioned educational ideals and his occasional extraordinary generosity.

When I was in his class I never knew whether he was really angry about something I did, or failed to do, or was faking anger for pedagogical purposes. He taught me Greek and Roman history. Because of his ruthless drilling I still remember a lot of it. I recall one occasion when I did not know the date of the Battle of Zama. He yelled at me
—
I have never forgotten it
—
202 BC. The last battle in the second Punic War.

Oderint dum metuant
, he used to say. Caligula’s favourite saying. That was his motto. Let them hate me as long as they fear me.

From the
Frankfurter Zeitung:

To achieve national regeneration after being defeated by the Prussians in 1871, the French used as one of their models the ideas of Wilhelm von Humboldt to reform their educational system. These had helped the Prussians recover after their defeat by Napoleon in 1806. Critical of their own system and respectful of Prussian ideas, the French in 1871 could not help but admire the victorious enemy’s schoolmasters.

In the discussions and conferences about our own educational reform after our defeat in 1918, it is regrettable that, as far as I know, no voices were raised to suggest that, in order to achieve our regeneration in the newly formed republic, we have something to learn from the French
instituteurs
who imbue French children with the republican virtues and the ideals of 1789 while at the same time demanding rigorous intellectual discipline. I am not suggesting that we lost the war because of the superiority of French schools and universities over our own, but I do believe that our schools are, in many respects, failing to meet the requirements of the new era and are all too often looking backwards rather than forwards. I remember that already during the war there was criticism in some circles that in our high schools not enough emphasis was placed on the study of
Bürgerkunde
[citizenship] and economics. I also remember that as early as 1902 the radical school reformer Ludwig Gurlitt, often called a pedagogical anarchist, complained that the German system produced “products of fear: pale, frightened, oppressed young people with no self-confidence who live timidly and hope only to do the bidding of their masters.”

It goes without saying that most teachers today are not crude drillmasters but at the same time it seems to me that in many of our educational institutions an old-fashioned authoritarian spirit is still present. I am therefore delighted that the new novel by Wilhelm Speyer,
Der Kampf der Tertia [The Third-Form Struggle]
, is such a success. It says something about our young people that despite whatever repressive authoritarianism still remains, much progress has been made since the days of Gurlitt, when nobody would have been able to conceive of such a plot. It is the story of public-spirited students themselves assuming authority in a good cause, with the well-meaning assent of their teachers and parents, and is in fact an exercise in exemplary citizenship. For those who have not yet read the book may I present a synopsis:

The action takes place in the forest camp near an imaginary co-educational private boarding school in the neighbourhood of a small town called Mayenweh. It is the story of the brilliantly executed coup by the Tertia, conducted in the students’ free time, to prevent the corrupt magistrates of Mayenweh from killing all the cats in town, on the patently unconvincing grounds that one of them was rabid. The cats were to be collected in potato sacks and beaten to death, the skins to be sold at a profit to enrich the magistrates. Clearly, the town represented society at large. The Tertianers’ attempt to organize a public protest against the situation had proven futile. Only collective action could succeed; only the group could achieve justice and give its members a sense of fulfillment and meaning. Much of the action is seen from the perspective of Borst, the smallest and perhaps the smartest Tertianer. He had learned strategy and cunning from the films of Charlie Chaplin.