The World полностью

‘I’m too poor to buy myself such a thing,’ grumbled Wilhelm. ‘Folks like us can’t rise to this; only a Rothschild can achieve it.’ As Bismarck negotiated a unified Germany with the German kings, the mood darkened at Prussian headquarters. The new French government refused the moderate terms and attacked the Prussians; French peasants joined an insurgency. Moltke ordered villages destroyed, civilians shot, but refused to bombard Paris. Three months later, moving with the king into Versailles, Bismarck got his way: Krupp cannon lobbed 12,000 shells into Paris. In the besieged city a worker’s rebellion seized power and declared the Paris Commune.

Bismarck needed a German monarch to make the request that Wilhelm should become German emperor, and the best candidate was the king of the largest kingdom after Prussia: the twenty-five-year-old Ludwig II of Bavaria. A grandson of Lola Montez’s patron, Ludwig was an unbalanced dreamer who on succeeding to the throne immediately invited to Munich his washed-up, indebted hero, the composer Richard Wagner, who since the 1848 revolution had left a trail of adulterous and indebted adventures. Ludwig identified with the mythical Lohengrin, Knight of the Swan, one of the German heroes that inspired Wagner, who was writing a new operatic cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen. Ludwig was dazzled by the masterful, wild-haired, sharp-chinned Wagner, who shamelessly flirted with the homosexual monarch. Ludwig sponsored his new opera Tristan und Isolde, but Wagner shocked the Bavarians with a wild affair with his conductor’s wife, Cosima Liszt, and then demanded the dismissal of the kingdom’s ministers. An offended Ludwig sent him away, but ultimately he funded Wagner’s own Festspielhaus and mansion in the small town of Bayreuth, where he presented his Ring, showcasing the soaring range and musical barrage of what he called Gesamtkunstwerk – total artwork – which in its way defined Germanness just as much as Bismarck’s new empire, the empire for which he now wanted Ludwig’s help.

The Swan King preferred a loose Germany under his Habsburg cousins and resisted Wilhelm’s request until Bismarck secretly paid him six million gold marks. Ludwig signed his Kaiserbrief asking that Wilhelm ‘extend presidential rights across the German states … with the title of German Kaiser’. On 18 January 1871, at a convocation of princes and ministers at Versailles, Bismarck ‘came forward in the grimmest of humours’ and read his ‘address to the German People’, after which a grand duke cried, ‘Long live Kaiser Wilhelm!’ A ‘thundering hurrah at least six times shook the room’.^* It was ‘the dream of German poets’, exulted the new kaiser’s son Fritz. ‘Germany has her emperor again …’ The guns thundered as they bombarded Paris. Finally the French Third Republic agreed to German terms, the loss of Alsace and Lorraine and payment of five billion francs, raised by James’s sons Gustave and Alphonse de Rothschild, who had helped defend Paris during the siege.

Bismarck designed an experimental German state, a hybrid of absolutism and democracy in which the king of Prussia, Wilhelm, presided over the many German kingdoms and principalities as kaiser, balanced by a Reichstag, elected by universal male suffrage – a mixed monarchy so complicated that it could be directed only by Europe’s most brilliant manipulator, Bismarck himself. Its contradictions made it unstable, probably unworkable, but it was instantly an economic powerhouse. Krupp, master of the greatest industrial complex in Europe, celebrated. The victorious war was his best advertisement. ‘Cast steel has won its present position as the most indispensable material in war and peace,’ the Cannon King crowed to the German kaiser. ‘Railways, the greatness of Germany, the fall of France, belong to the steel age.’ Now residing in a new 300-room palace Villa Hügel outside Essen, employing 20,000 workers drilled in special Krupp uniforms, Krupp trained his son Fritz as heir.

Bismarck, appointed chancellor and raised to prince, feared the death of his octogenarian kaiser Wilhelm: his heir, Fritz, who had distinguished himself in the war, was a liberal, influenced by his English wife Vicky. Bismarck hated both as obstacles to his plans. The strain of managing his incoherent invention was compulsive but draining even for the cynical, ingenious chancellor. Into his seventies, he could dictate memoranda for five hours while micromanaging his own multiple conspiracies. Yet the stress led to a spiralling psychosis of paranoia, gluttony and insomnia that almost killed him – only saved by a doctor who lovingly placed him on a diet, relaxed him by wrapping him in blankets and held his hand until he finally slept.