Part 8

The distinguished German historian, Heinrich von Treitschke, writes of King Frederick William IV, the predecessor of Emperor William I, as follows:--

"He believed in a mysterious enlightenment which is granted 'von Gottes Gnaden' to kings rather than other mortals. All the blessings of peace, which his People could expect under a Christian monarch, should Proceed from the wisdom of the Crown alone; he regarded his high office like a patriarch of the Old Testament and held the kingship as a fatherly power established by God Himself for the education of the people. Whatever happened in the State he connected with the person of the monarch. If only his age and its royal awakener had understood each other better! He had, however, in his strangely complicated process of development, constructed such extraordinary ideals that though he might sometimes agree in words with his contemporaries he never did as to the things, and spoke a different language from his people. Even General Gerlach, his good friend and servant, used to say: 'The ways of the King are wonderful;' and the not less loyal Bunsen wrote about a complaint of the monarch that 'no one understands me, no one agrees with me,' the commentary--'When one understood him, how could one agree with him?'"

It was this king, be it parenthetically remarked, who said, when his people were clamouring for a Constitution, in 1847: "Now and never will I admit that a written paper, like a second Providence, force itself between our God in Heaven and this land"--and a few months later had to sign the document his people demanded.

Von Treitschke, writing on the last birthday of Emperor William I, thus spoke of the doctrine:

"A generation ago an attempt was made by a theologizing State theory to inculcate the doctrine of a power of the throne, divine, released from all earthly obligations. This mystery of the Jacobins never found entrance into the clear common sense of our people."

Prince Bismarck's view of the doctrine was explained in a speech he made to the Prussian Diet in 1847. He was speaking on "Prussia as a Christian State." "For me," he said,

"the words 'von Gottes Gnaden,' which Christian rulers join to their names, are no empty phrase, but I see in them the recognition that the princes desire to wield the sceptre which God has assigned them according to the will of God on earth. As God's will I can, however, only recognize what is revealed in the Christian gospels, and I believe I am in my right when I call that State a Christian one which has taken as its task the realization, the putting into operation, of the Christian doctrine.... Assuming generally that the State has a religious foundation, in my opinion this foundation can only be Christianity. Take away this religious foundation from the State and we retain nothing of the State but a chance aggregation of rights, a kind of bulwark against the war of all against all, which the old philosophers spoke of."

On the second occasion, thirty years later, the Chancellor's theme was "Obedience to God and the King."

"I refer," he said,

"to the wrong interpretation of a sentence which in itself is right--namely, that one must obey God rather than man. The previous speaker must know me long enough to be aware that I subscribe to the entire correctness of this sentence, and that I believe I obey God when I serve the King under the device 'With God for King and Country.' Now he (the previous speaker) has separated the component parts of the device, for he sees God separated from King and Fatherland. I cannot follow him on this road. I believe I serve my God when I serve my King in the protection of the commonwealth whose monarch 'von Gottes Gnaden' he is, and on whom the emancipation from alien spiritual influence and the independence of his people from Romish pressure have been laid by God as a duty in which I serve the King. The previous speaker would certainly admit in private that we do not believe in the divinity of a State idol, though he seems to assert here that we believe in it."

In these passages, it may be remarked, Bismarck avoids an unconditional endorsement of the Hohenzollern doctrine of divine "right" or even divine appointment. Indeed all he does is to express his belief in the sincerity of rulers who declare their desire to rule in accordance with the will of God as it appears in Holy Scripture. In addition to his dislike of a "Christianity above the State," the fact that he did not subscribe to the doctrine of divine right, as these words are interpreted in England, is shown by another speech in which he said, "The essence of the constitutional monarchy under which we live is the co-operation of the monarchical will and the convictions of the people." But what, one is tempted to ask, if will and convictions differ?

In recent times, Dr. Paul Liman, in an excellent character sketch of the Emperor, devotes his first chapter to the subject, thus recognizing the important place it occupies in the Emperor's mentality. Dr. Liman, like all German writers who have dealt with the topic, animadverts on the Hohenzollern obsession by the theory and attributes it chiefly to the romantic side of the Emperor's nature which was strongly influenced in youth by the "wonderful events" of 1870, by the national outburst of thanks to God at the time, and by the return from victorious war of his father, his grandfather, and other heroes, as they must have appeared to him, like Bismarck, Moltke, and Roon.

It is worth noting that Prince von Bülow, during the ten years of his Chancellorship, made no parliamentary or other specific and public allusion to the doctrine.

Before, however, attempting to offer a somewhat different explanation of the Emperor's attitude in the matter from those just cited, let us see what statements he has himself made publicly about it and how the doctrine has been interpreted by his contemporaries. He made no reference to it in his declarations to the army, the navy, and the people when he ascended the throne. His first allusion to it was in March, 1890, at the annual meeting of the Brandenburg provincial Diet at the Kaiserhof Hotel in Berlin, and then the allusion was not explicit. "I see," said the Emperor,

"in the folk and land which have descended to me a talent entrusted to me by God, which it is my task to increase, and I intend with all my power so to administer this talent that I hope to be able to add much to it. Those who are willing to help me I heartily welcome whoever they may be: those who oppose me in this task I will crush."

His next allusion, at Bremen in April of the same year, when he was laying the foundation-stone of a statue to his grandfather, King William, a few months subsequent to Bismarck's retirement, was more explicit, yet not completely so.

"It is a tradition of our House," so ran his speech,

"that we, the Hohenzollerns, regard ourselves as appointed by God to govern and to lead the people, whom it is given us to rule, for their well-being and the advancement of their material and intellectual interests."

The next reference, and the only one in which a divine "right" to rule in Prussia is formally claimed, occurs four years later at Koenigsberg, the ancient crowning-place of Prussian kings. Here he said:--

"The successor (namely himself) of him who of his own right was sovereign prince in Prussia will follow the same path as his great ancestor; as formerly the first King (of Prussia, Frederick I.) said, 'My crown is born with me,' and as his greater son (the Great Elector) gave his authority the stability of a rock of bronze, so I too, like my imperial grandfather, represent the kingship 'von Gottes Gnaden.'"

At Coblenz in 1897, in reference to the first Emperor William's labours for the army and people:--

"He (Emperor William) left Coblenz to ascend the throne as the selected instrument of the Lord he always regarded himself to be. For us all, and above all for us princes, he raised once more aloft and lent lustrous beams to a jewel which we should hold high and holy--that is the kingship von Gottes Gnaden, the kingship with its onerous duties, its never-ending, ever-continuing trouble and labour, with its fearful responsibility to the Creator alone, from which no human being, no minister, no parliament, no people can release the prince."

Here, too, if the words "responsibility to the Creator alone" be taken in their ordinary English sense, the allusion to a divine right may be construed, though it is observable that the word "right" is not actually employed.

In Berlin, when unveiling a monument to the Great Elector, the Emperor was filled with the same idea of the God-given mission of the Hohenzollerns. After briefly sketching the deeds of the Elector--how he came young to the throne to find crops down-trodden, villages burnt to the ground, a starved and fallen people, persecuted on every side, his country the arena for barbarous robber-bands who had spread war and devastation throughout Germany for thirty years; how, with "invincible reliance on God" and an iron will, he swept the pieces of the land together, raised trade and commerce, agriculture and industry, in for that period an incredibly short time; how he brought into existence a new army entirely devoted to him; how, in fine, guided by the hope of founding a great northern Empire, which would bring the German peoples together, he became an authority in Europe and laid the corner-stone of the present Empire--after sketching all this, the Emperor continues:

"How is this wonderful success of the house of Hohenzollern to be explained? Solely in this way, that every prince of the House is conscious from the beginning that he is only an earthly vicegerent, who must give an account of his labour to a higher King and Master, and show that he has been a faithful executor of the high commands laid upon him."

One finds exactly the same idea expressed three months later when talking to his "Men of Brandenburg." "You know well," he reminded them,

"that I regard my whole position and my task as laid on me by Heaven, and that I am appointed by a Higher Power to whom I must later render an account. Accordingly I can assure you that not a morning or evening passes without a prayer for my people and a special thought for my Mark Brandenburg."

To the Anglo-Saxon understanding, of course, the theory of divine right has long appeared untenable, obsolete, and, as Macaulay says, absurd. Many people to-day would go farther and argue that there is no such thing as a divine right at all, since "rights" are a purely human idea, possibly a purely legal one. But it is at least doubtful that the Emperor uses the expression "von Gottes Gnaden" in a sense exactly coterminous with that of "divine right" as used by Lord Macaulay and later Anglo-Saxon writers and speakers. The latter, when dealing with things German, not unfrequently fall into the error of mistranslation and are thus at times responsible for national misunderstandings. The Italian saying, "traduttore, tradittore," is the expression of a fact too seldom recognized, especially by those whose business it is to interpret, so to speak, one people to another. Language is as mysterious and elusive a thing as aught connected with humanity, as love, for example, or music; and it may be asserted with some degree of confidence that among every people there are ideas current, and in all departments--in law, society, art--which it is impossible exactly to translate into the speech of other nations. The words used may be the same, but the connotation, all the words imply and suggest, is, perhaps in very important respects, different, and requires a paraphrase, longer or shorter, to explain them. Take the word "false" in English and "falsch" in German. They look alike, yet while the English "false" carries with it a moral reproach, the German word, where the context does not explicitly prove otherwise, means simply "incorrect," "erroneous," without the moral reproach added. Accordingly, when a German Chancellor asserts that the statement of an English Minister is "falsch" he does not necessarily mean anything offensive, but only that the English Minister is mistaken.